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For Project Gutenberg

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

BY JANE ADDAMS

HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO

AUTHOR OF "DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS," "NEWER IDEALS OF PEACE," "THE

SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE CITY STREETS," ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

NORAH HAMILTON

HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO

TO

THE MEMORY OF

MY FATHER

PREFACE

CONTENTS

Preface vii

I. EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 1

II. INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 23

III. BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 43

IV. THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 65

V. FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 89

VI. THE SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 113

VII. SOME EARLY UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 129

VIII. PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 154

IX. A DECADE OF ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 177

X. PIONEER LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 198

XI. IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN 231

XII. TOLSTOYISM 259

XIII. PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 281

XIV. CIVIC COOPERATION 310

XV. THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 342

XVI. ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 371

XVII. ECHOES OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 400

XVIII. SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 427

PLATES

Jane Addams, from a photograph taken in 1899 Frontispiece

John H. Addams, from a photograph taken in 1880 22

Ellen Gates Starr, from a photograph taken in 1906 64

A Hull-House Interior 88

A View from a Hull-House Window 112

A Spent Old Man 154

Sweatshop Workers 198

Chicago River at Halsted Street 258

Polk Street opposite Hull-House 280

Julia C. Lathrop 310

A Studio in Hull-House Court 370

A View between Hull-House Gymnasium and Theater 426

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

Birthplace, Jane Addams, Cedarville, Illinois 4

Jane Addams, aged Seven, from a Photograph of 1867 7

Mill at Cedarville, Illinois 10

Stream at Cedarville, Illinois 22

Old Abe 42

Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois 44

Porto del Popolo, Rome 76

View of St. Peter's 88

Polk Street opposite Hull-House 95

South Halsted Street opposite Hull-House 96

Consulting the Hull-House Bulletin Board, from a Photograph by

Lewis W. Hine 104

A Boy's Club Member 105

An Italian Woman with Grandchild 111

Portrait, Jane Addams, from a Charcoal Drawing by Alice Kellogg

Tyler of 1892 114

Main Entrance to Hull-House 128

Head of Slavic Woman 134

Head of Italian Woman 135

A Doorway in Hull-House Court 149

Woman and Child in Hull-House Reception Room 154

In a Tenement House, Sick Mother and Children 164

A Row of Nursery Babies 168

A Neighborhood Alley 181

Hull-House on Halsted Street, Apartment House in Foreground 197

An Italian Sweatshop Worker 208

Out of Work, from a Drawing by Alice Kellogg Tyler 220

Head of Immigrant Woman 226

Aniello 235

Irish Spinner in the Hull-House Labor Museum 238

Scandinavian Weaver in the Hull-House Labor Museum 239

Italian Spinner in the Hull-House Labor Museum 241

An Italian Grocery opposite Hull-House 258

Sketches of Tolstoy Mowing 271

Head of Russian Immigrant 275

Rear Tenement in Hull-House Neighborhood 282

An Alley near Hull-House 293

A View from Hull-House Window 314

Alley between Hull-House Buildings 321

A Window in the Hull-House Library 346

An Italian Mother and Child 354

Facade of Bowen Hall 363

A Club Child listening to a Story 367

In the Hull-House Studio, from a Photograph by Lewis W. Hine 374

Exterior Hull-House Music School 379

In the Hull-House Music School 383

Terrace in the Hull-House Court 398

South Halsted Street 401

Russian Immigrant on Halsted Street, from a Photograph by Lewis W. Hine 416

Entrance to Hull-House Courtyard 426

Boy at Forge, Hull-House Boy's Club, from a Photograph by Lewis W. Hine 439

Steps to Hull-House Terrace 447

Waiting in the Hull-House Hall 453

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This book has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at the

Celebration of Women Writers through the combined work of: Adrienne

Fermoyle, Andrea Jeddi, David Cheezem, Diana Camden, Flo Carriere, Jill

Thoren, Judi Oswalt, Margaret Sylvia, Samantha M. Constant, Terri Perkins,

and Mary Mark Ockerbloom.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Preface." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by Jane

Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. vii-ix.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

PREFACE

Every preface is, I imagine, written after the book has been

completed and now that I have finished this volume I will state

several difficulties which may put the reader upon his guard

unless he too postpones the preface to the very last.

Many times during the writing of these reminiscences, I have

become convinced that the task was undertaken all too soon.

One's fiftieth year is indeed an impressive milestone at which

one may well pause to take an accounting, but the people with

whom I have so long journeyed have become so intimate a part of

my lot that they cannot be written of either in praise or blame;

the public movements and causes with which I am still identified

have become so endeared, some of them through their very

struggles and failures, that it is difficult to discuss them.

It has also been hard to determine what incidents and experiences

should be selected for recital, and I have found that I might

give an accurate report of each isolated event and yet give a

totally misleading impression of the whole, solely by the

selection of the incidents. For these reasons and many others I

have found it difficult to make a [Page viii] faithful record of

the years since the autumn of 1889 when without any preconceived

social theories or economic views, I came to live in an

industrial district of Chicago.

If the reader should inquire why the book was ever undertaken in

the face of so many difficulties, in reply I could instance two

purposes, only one of which in the language of organized charity,

is "worthy." Because Settlements have multiplied so easily in the

United States I hoped that a simple statement of an earlier

effort, including the stress and storm, might be of value in

their interpretation and possibly clear them of a certain charge

of superficiality. The unworthy motive was a desire to start a

"backfire," as it were, to extinquish two biographies of myself,

one of which had been submitted to me in outline, that made life

in a Settlement all too smooth and charming.

The earlier chapters present influences and personal motives with

a detail which will be quite unpardonable if they fail to make

clear the personality upon whom various social and industrial

movements in Chicago reacted during a period of twenty years. No

effort is made in the recital to separate my own history from

that of Hull-House during the years in which I was "launched deep

into the stormy intercourse of human life" for, so far as a mind

is pliant under the pressure of events and experiences, it

becomes hard to detach it.

It has unfortunately been necessary to abandon [Page ix] the

chronological order in favor of the topical, for during the early

years at Hull-House, time seemed to afford a mere framework for

certain lines of activity and I have found in writing this book,

that after these activities have been recorded, I can scarcely

recall the scaffolding.

More than a third of the material in the book has appeared in The

American Magazine, one chapter of it in McClure's Magazine, and

earlier statements of the Settlement motive, published years ago,

have been utilized in chronological order because it seemed

impossible to reproduce their enthusiasm.

It is a matter of gratification to me that the book is

illustrated from drawings made by Miss Norah Hamilton of

Hull-House, and the cover designed by another resident, Mr. Frank

Hazenplug. I am indebted for the making of the index and for

many other services to Miss Clara Landsberg, also of Hull-House.

If the conclusions of the whole matter are similar to those I have

already published at intervals during the twenty years at

Hull-House, I can only make the defense that each of the earlier

books was an attempt to set forth a thesis supported by

experience, whereas this volume endeavors to trace the experiences

through which various conclusions were forced upon me.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter I: Earliest Impressions." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by Jane

Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 1-22.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

CHAPTER I

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS

On the theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our

childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that

"No-Man's Land" where character is formless but nevertheless

settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this

record with some impressions of my childhood.

All of these are directly connected with my father, although of

course I recall many experiences apart from him. I was one of

the younger members of a large family and an eager participant in

the village life, but because my father was so distinctly the

dominant influence and because it is quite impossible to set

forth all of one's early impressions, it has seemed simpler to

string these first memories on that single cord. Moreover, it

was this cord which not only held fast my supreme affections, but

also first drew me into the moral concerns of life, and later

afforded a clew there to which I somewhat wistfully clung in the

intricacy of its mazes.

It must have been from a very early period that I recall "horrid

nights" when I tossed about in my bed because I had told a lie. I

was held in the grip of a miserable dread of death, a double

fear, first, that I myself should die in my sins and go straight

to that fiery Hell which was never mentioned at home, but which I

had heard all about from other children, and, second, that my

father--representing the entire adult world which I had basely

deceived--should himself die before I had time to tell him. My

only method of obtaining relief was to go downstairs to my

father's room and make full confession. The high resolve to do

this would push me out of bed and carry me down the stairs

without a touch of fear. But at the foot of the stairs I would

be faced by the awful necessity of passing the front door--which

my father, because of his Quaker tendencies, did not lock--and of

crossing the wide and black expanse of the living room in order

to reach his door. I would invariably cling to the newel post

while I contemplated the perils of the situation, complicated by

the fact that the literal first step meant putting my bare foot

upon a piece of oilcloth in front of the door, only a few inches

wide, but lying straight in my path. I would finally reach my

father's bedside perfectly breathless and having panted out the

history of my sin, invariable received the same assurance that if

he "had a little girl who told lies," he was very glad that she

"felt too bad to go to sleep afterward." No absolution was asked

for or received, but apparently the sense that the knowledge of

my wickedness was shared, or an obscure understanding of the

affection which underlay the grave statement, was sufficient, for

I always went back to bed as bold as a lion, and slept, if not

the sleep of the just, at least that of the comforted.

I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven

years old, for the mill in which my father transacted his business

that day was closed in 1867. The mill stood in the neighboring

town adjacent to its poorest quarter. Before then I had always

seen the little city of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes

of a country child, and it had never occurred to me that all its

streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the one which

contained the glittering toyshop and the confectioner. On that day

I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and

felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the

country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest

streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry

why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together,

and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much

firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house,

but it would not be built among the other large houses, but right

in the midst of horrid little houses like those.

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's

affairs which little children often exhibit because "the old man

clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd

manifestation. I dreamed night after night that every one in the

world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the

responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street

remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was "all there,"

even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary

place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They

had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery,

and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood

in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to

how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully

realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until

at least one wheel should be made and something started. Every

victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive

sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a fearful

handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps

never were the odds more heavily against "a warder of the world"

than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in

equal parts of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the

end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of

whom were found in the village. The next morning would often

find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further

disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the

village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly,

red-shirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such

details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and

sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. "Do you always

have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask, thinking how

horrid it would be to do. "Sure!" the good-natured blacksmith

would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh heavily and

walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of

course I confided to no one, for there is something too

mysterious in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields

of sleep" to be communicated, although it is at the same time too

heavy a burden to be borne alone.

My great veneration and pride in my father manifested itself in

curious ways. On several Sundays, doubtless occurring in two or

three different years, the Union Sunday School of the village was

visited by strangers, some of those "strange people" who live

outside a child's realm, yet constantly thrill it by their close

approach. My father taught the large Bible class in the lefthand

corner of the church next to the pulpit, and to my eyes at least,

was a most imposing figure in his Sunday frock coat, his fine

head rising high above all the others. I imagined that the

strangers were filled with admiration for this dignified person,

and I prayed with all my heart that the ugly, pigeon-toed little

girl, whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held

very much upon one side, would never be pointed out to these

visitors as the daughter of this fine man. In order to lessen

the possibility of a connection being made, on these particular

Sundays I did not walk beside my father, although this walk was

the great event of the week, but attached myself firmly to the

side of my Uncle James Addams, in the hope that I should be

mistaken for his child, or at least that I should not remain so

conspicuously unattached that troublesome questions might

identify an Ugly Duckling with her imposing parent. My uncle,

who had many children of his own, must have been mildly surprised

at this unwonted attention, but he would look down kindly at me,

and say, "So you are going to walk with me to-day?" "Yes,

please, Uncle James," would be my meek reply. He fortunately

never explored my motives, nor do I remember that my father ever

did, so that in all probability my machinations have been safe

from public knowledge until this hour.

It is hard to account for the manifestations of a child's adoring

affection, so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the

affairs of the imagination. I simply could not endure the

thought that "strange people" should know that my handsome father

owned this homely little girl. But even in my chivalric desire

to protect him from his fate, I was not quite easy in the

sacrifice of my uncle, although I quieted my scruples with the

reflection that the contrast was less marked and that, anyway,

his own little girl "was not so very pretty." I do not know that

I commonly dwelt much upon my personal appearance, save as it

thrust itself as an incongruity into my father's life, and in

spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black

moments when I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might

not share the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was laid

before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar by a very

trifling incident. One day I met my father coming out of his

bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to

me a veritable whirlpool of society and commerce. With a playful

touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high and shining silk hat

and made me an imposing bow. This distinguished public

recognition, this totally unnecessary identification among a mass

of "strange people" who couldn't possibly know unless he himself

made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity

of the entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as

absurd as it really was, but at least it seemed enough so to

collapse or to pass into the limbo of forgotten specters.

I made still other almost equally grotesque attempts to express

this doglike affection. The house at the end of the village in

which I was born, and which was my home until I moved to

Hull-House, in my earliest childhood had opposite to it--only

across the road and then across a little stretch of

greensward--two mills belonging to my father; one flour mill, to

which the various grains were brought by the neighboring farmers,

and one sawmill, in which the logs of the native timber were

sawed into lumber. The latter offered the great excitement of

sitting on a log while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which

was cutting it into slabs, and of getting off just in time to

escape a sudden and gory death. But the flouring mill was much

more beloved. It was full of dusky, floury places which we

adored, of empty bins in which we might play house; it had a

basement, with piles of bran and shorts which were almost as good

as sand to play in, whenever the miller let us wet the edges of

the pile with water brought in his sprinkling pot from the

mill-race.

In addition to these fascinations was the association of the mill

with my father's activities, for doubtless at that time I

centered upon him all that careful imitation which a little girl

ordinarily gives to her mother's ways and habits. My mother had

died when I was a baby and my father's second marriage did not

occur until my eighth year.

I had a consuming ambition to posses a miller's thumb, and would

sit contentedly for a long time rubbing between my thumb and

fingers the ground wheat as it fell from between the millstones,

before it was taken up on an endless chain of mysterious little

buckets to be bolted into flour. I believe I have never since

wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to

be flattened, as my father's had become, during his earlier years

of a miller's life. Somewhat discouraged by the slow process of

structural modification, I also took measures to secure on the

backs of my hands the tiny purple and red spots which are always

found on the hands of the miller who dresses millstones. The

marks on my father's hands had grown faint, but were quite

visible when looked for, and seemed to me so desirable that they

must be procured at all costs. Even when playing in our house or

yard, I could always tell when the millstones were being dressed,

because the rumbling of the mill then stopped, and there were few

pleasures I would not instantly forego, rushing at once to the

mill, that I might spread out my hands near the mill-stones in

the hope that the little hard flints flying form the miller's

chisel would light upon their backs and make the longed-for

marks. I used hotly to accuse the German miller, my dear friend

Ferdinand, "of trying not to hit my hands," but he scornfully

replied that he could not hit them if he did try, and that they

were too little to be of use in a mill anyway. Although I hated

his teasing, I never had the courage to confess my real purpose.

This sincere tribute of imitation, which affection offers to its

adored object, had later, I hope, subtler manifestations, but

certainly these first ones were altogether genuine. In this

case, too, I doubtless contributed my share to that stream of

admiration which our generation so generously poured forth for

the self-made man. I was consumed by a wistful desire to

apprehend the hardships of my father's earlier life in that

faraway time when he had been a miller's apprentice. I knew that

he still woke up punctually at three o'clock because for so many

years he had taken his turn at the mill in the early morning, and

if by chance I awoke at the same hour, as curiously enough I

often did, I imagined him in the early dawn in my uncle's old

mill reading through the entire village library, book after book,

beginning with the lives of the signers of the Declaration of

Independence. Copies of the same books, mostly bound in

calfskin, were to be found in the library below, and I

courageously resolved that I too would read them all and try to

understand life as he did. I did in fact later begin a course of

reading in the early morning hours, but I was caught by some

fantastic notion of chronological order and early legendary form.

Pope's translation of the "Iliad," even followed by Dryden's

"Virgil," did not leave behind the residuum of wisdom for which I

longed, and I finally gave them up for a thick book entitled "The

History of the World" as affording a shorter and an easier path.

Although I constantly confided my sins and perplexities to my

father, there are only a few occasions on which I remember having

received direct advice or admonition; it may easily be true,

however, that I have forgotten the latter, in the manner of many

seekers after advice who enjoyably set forth their situation but

do not really listen to the advice itself. I can remember an

admonition on one occasion, however, when, as a little girl of

eight years, arrayed in a new cloak, gorgeous beyond anything I

had ever worn before, I stood before my father for his approval.

I was much chagrined by his remark that it was a very pretty

cloak--in fact so much prettier than any cloak the other little

girls in the Sunday School had, that he would advise me to wear

my old cloak, which would keep me quite as warm, with the added

advantage of not making the other little girls feel badly. I

complied with the request but I fear without inner consent, and I

certainly was quite without the joy of self-sacrifice as I walked

soberly through the village street by the side of my counselor.

My mind was busy, however, with the old question eternally

suggested by the inequalities of the human lot. Only as we

neared the church door did I venture to ask what could be done

about it, receiving the reply that it might never be righted so

far as clothes went, but that people might be equal in things

that mattered much more than clothes, the affairs of education

and religion, for instance, which we attended to when we went to

school and church, and that it was very stupid to wear the sort

of clothes that made it harder to have equality even there.

It must have been a little later when I held a conversation with

my father upon the doctrine of foreordination, which at one time

very much perplexed my childish mind. After setting the

difficulty before him and complaining that I could not make it

out, although my best friend "understood it perfectly," I settled

down to hear his argument, having no doubt that he could make it

quite clear. To my delighted surprise, for any intimation that

our minds were on an equality lifted me high indeed, he said that

he feared that he and I did not have the kind of mind that would

ever understand fore-ordination very well and advised me not to

give too much time to it; but he then proceeded to say other

things of which the final impression left upon my mind was, that

it did not matter much whether one understood foreordination or

not, but that it was very important not to pretend to understand

what you didn't understand and that you must always be honest

with yourself inside, whatever happened. Perhaps on the whole as

valuable a lesson as the shorter catechism itself contains.

My memory merges this early conversation on religious doctrine

into one which took place years later when I put before my father

the situation in which I found myself at boarding school when

under great evangelical pressure, and once again I heard his

testimony in favor of "mental integrity above everything else."

At the time we were driving through a piece of timber in which

the wood choppers had been at work during the winter, and so

earnestly were we talking that he suddenly drew up the horses to

find that he did not know where he was. We were both entertained

by the incident, I that my father had been "lost in his own

timber" so that various cords of wood must have escaped his

practiced eye, and he on his side that he should have become so

absorbed in this maze of youthful speculation. We were in high

spirits as we emerged from the tender green of the spring woods

into the clear light of day, and as we came back into the main

road I categorically asked him:-

"What are you? What do you say when people ask you?"

His eyes twinkled a little as he soberly replied:

"I am a Quaker."

"But that isn't enough to say," I urged.

"Very well," he added, "to people who insist upon details, as some

one is doing now, I add that I am a Hicksite Quaker"; and not

another word on the weighty subject could I induce him to utter.

These early recollections are set in a scene of rural beauty,

unusual at least for Illinois. The prairie around the village

was broken into hills, one of them crowned by pine woods, grown

up from a bag full of Norway pine seeds sown by my father in

1844, the very year he came to Illinois, a testimony perhaps that

the most vigorous pioneers gave at least an occasional thought to

beauty. The banks of the mill stream rose into high bluffs too

perpendicular to be climbed without skill, and containing caves

of which one at least was so black that it could not be explored

without the aid of a candle; and there was a deserted limekiln

which became associated in my mind with the unpardonable sin of

Hawthorne's "Lime-Burner." My stepbrother and I carried on games

and crusades which lasted week after week, and even summer after

summer, as only free-ranging country children can do. It may be

in contrast to this that one of the most piteous aspects in the

life of city children, as I have seen it in the neighborhood of

Hull-House, is the constant interruption to their play which is

inevitable on the streets, so that it can never have any

continuity--the most elaborate "plan or chart" or "fragment from

their dream of human life" is sure to be rudely destroyed by the

passing traffic. Although they start over and over again, even

the most vivacious become worn out at last and take to that

passive "standing 'round" varied by rude horseplay, which in time

becomes so characteristic of city children.

We had of course our favorite places and trees and birds and

flowers. It is hard to reproduce the companionship which

children establish with nature, but certainly it is much too

unconscious and intimate to come under the head of aesthetic

appreciation or anything of the sort. When we said that the

purple wind-flowers--the anemone patens--"looked as if the winds

had made them," we thought much more of the fact that they were

wind-born than that they were beautiful: we clapped our hands in

sudden joy over the soft radiance of the rainbow, but its

enchantment lay in our half belief that a pot of gold was to be

found at its farther end; we yielded to a soft melancholy when we

heard the whippoorwill in the early twilight, but while he

aroused in us vague longings of which we spoke solemnly, we felt

no beauty in his call.

We erected an altar beside the stream, to which for several years

we brought all the snakes we killed during our excursions, no

matter how long the toil--some journey which we had to make with

a limp snake dangling between two sticks. I remember rather

vaguely the ceremonial performed upon this altar one autumn day,

when we brought as further tribute one out of every hundred of

the black walnuts which we had gathered, and then poured over the

whole a pitcher full of cider, fresh from the cider mill on the

barn floor. I think we had also burned a favorite book or two

upon this pyre of stones. The entire affair carried on with such

solemnity was probably the result of one of those imperative

impulses under whose compulsion children seek a ceremonial which

shall express their sense of identification with man's primitive

life and their familiar kinship with the remotest past.

Long before we had begun the study of Latin at the village

school, my brother and I had learned the Lord's Prayer in Latin

out of an old copy of the Vulgate, and gravely repeated it every

night in an execrable pronunciation because it seemed to us more

religious than "plain English."

When, however, I really prayed, what I saw before my eyes was a

most outrageous picture which adorned a song-book used in Sunday

School, portraying the Lord upon his throne, surrounded by tiers

and tiers of saints and angels all in a blur of yellow. I am

ashamed to tell how old I was when that picture ceased to appear

before my eyes, especially when moments of terror compelled me to

ask protection from the heavenly powers.

I recall with great distinctness my first direct contact with

death when I was fifteen years old: Polly was an old nurse who

had taken care of my mother and had followed her to frontier

Illinois to help rear a second generation of children. She had

always lived in our house, but made annual visits to her cousins

on a farm a few miles north of the village. During one of those

visits, word came to us one Sunday evening that Polly was dying,

and for a number of reasons I was the only person able to go to

her. I left the lamp-lit, warm house to be driven four miles

through a blinding storm which every minute added more snow to

the already high drifts, with a sense of starting upon a fateful

errand. An hour after my arrival all of the cousin's family went

downstairs to supper, and I was left alone to watch with Polly.

The square, old-fashioned chamber in the lonely farmhouse was

very cold and still, with nothing to be heard but the storm

outside. Suddenly the great change came. I heard a feeble call

of "Sarah," my mother's name, as the dying eyes were turned upon

me, followed by a curious breathing and in place of the face

familiar from my earliest childhood and associated with homely

household cares, there lay upon the pillow strange, august

features, stern and withdrawn from all the small affairs of life.

That sense of solitude, of being unsheltered in a wide world of

relentless and elemental forces which is at the basis of

childhood's timidity and which is far from outgrown at fifteen,

seized me irresistibly before I could reach the narrow stairs and

summon the family from below.

As I was driven home in the winter storm, the wind through the

trees seemed laden with a passing soul and the riddle of life and

death pressed hard; once to be young, to grow old and to die,

everything came to that, and then a mysterious journey out into

the Unknown. Did she mind faring forth alone? Would the journey

perhaps end in something as familiar and natural to the aged and

dying as life is to the young and living? Through all the drive

and indeed throughout the night these thoughts were pierced by

sharp worry, a sense of faithlessness because I had forgotten the

text Polly had confided to me long before as the one from which

she wished her funeral sermon to be preached. My comfort as

usual finally came from my father, who pointed out what was

essential and what was of little avail even in such a moment as

this, and while he was much too wise to grow dogmatic upon the

great theme of death, I felt a new fellowship with him because we

had discussed it together.

Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so

often made, to shield children and young people from all that has

to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all

hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon

enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on

the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if

they were denied the common human experiences. They too wish to

climb steep stairs and to eat their bread with tears, and they

imagine that the problems of existence which so press upon them

in pensive moments would be less insoluble in the light of these

great happenings.

An incident which stands out clearly in my mind as an exciting

suggestion of the great world of moral enterprise and serious

undertakings must have occurred earlier than this, for in 1872,

when I was not yet twelve years old, I came into my father's room

one morning to find him sitting beside the fire with a newspaper in

his hand, looking very solemn; and upon my eager inquiry what had

happened, he told me that Joseph Mazzini was dead. I had never

even heard Mazzini's name, and after being told about him I was

inclined to grow argumentative, asserting that my father did not

know him, that he was not an American, and that I could not

understand why we should be expected to feel badly about him. It

is impossible to recall the conversation with the complete

breakdown of my cheap arguments, but in the end I obtained that

which I have ever regarded as a valuable possession, a sense of the

genuine relationship which may exist between men who share large

hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality,

language, and creed; that those things count for absolutely nothing

between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America

or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy. At any rate, I was

heartily ashamed of my meager notion of patriotism, and I came out

of the room exhilarated with the consciousness that impersonal and

international relations are actual facts and not mere phrases. I

was filled with pride that I knew a man who held converse with

great minds and who really sorrowed and rejoiced over happenings

across the sea. I never recall those early conversations with my

father, nor a score of others like them, but there comes into my

mind a line from Mrs. Browning in which a daughter describes her

relations with her father:--

"He wrapt me in his large

Man's doublet, careless did it fit or no."

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer David Cheezem.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter II: Influence of Lincoln." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 23-43.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER II

INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN

I suppose all the children who were born about the time of the

Civil War have recollections quite unlike those of the children

who are living now. Although I was but four and a half years old

when Lincoln died, I distinctly remember the day when I found on

our two white gateposts American flags companioned with black. I

tumbled down on the harsh gravel walk in my eager rush into the

house to inquire what they were "there for." To my amazement I

found my father in tears, something that I had never seen before,

having assumed, as all children do, that grown-up people never

cried. The two flags, my father's tears, and his impressive

statement that the greatest man in the world had died, constituted

my initiation, my baptism, as it were, into the thrilling and

solemn interests of a world lying quite outside the two white

gateposts. The great war touched children in many ways: I

remember an engraved roster of names, headed by the words "Addams'

Guard," and the whole surmounted by the insignia of the American

eagle clutching many flags, which always hung in the family

living-room. As children we used to read this list of names again

and again. We could reach it only by dint of putting the family

Bible on a chair and piling the dictionary on top of it; using the

Bible to stand on was always accompanied by a little thrill of

superstitious awe, although we carefully put the dictionary above

that our profane feet might touch it alone. Having brought the

roster within reach of our eager fingers,--fortunately it was

glazed,--we would pick out the names of those who "had fallen on

the field" from those who "had come back from the war," and from

among the latter those whose children were our schoolmates. When

drives were planned, we would say, "Let us take this road," that

we might pass the farm where a soldier had once lived; if flowers

from the garden were to be given away, we would want them to go to

the mother of one of those heroes whose names we knew from the

"Addams' Guard." If a guest should become interested in the roster

on the wall, he was at once led by the eager children to a small

picture of Colonel Davis which hung next the opposite window, that

he might see the brave Colonel of the Regiment. The introduction

to the picture of the one-armed man seemed to us a very solemn

ceremony, and long after the guest was tired of listening, we

would tell each other all about the local hero, who at the head of

his troops had suffered wounds unto death. We liked very much to

talk to a gentle old lady who lived in a white farmhouse a mile

north of the village. She was the mother of the village hero,

Tommy, and used to tell us of her long anxiety during the spring

of '62; how she waited day after day for the hospital to surrender

up her son, each morning airing the white homespun sheets and

holding the little bedroom in immaculate readiness. It was after

the battle of Fort Donelson that Tommy was wounded and had been

taken to the hospital at Springfield; his father went down to him

and saw him getting worse each week, until it was clear that he

was going to die; but there was so much red tape about the

department, and affairs were so confused, that his discharge could

not be procured. At last the hospital surgeon intimated to his

father that he should quietly take him away; a man as sick as

that, it would be all right; but when they told Tommy, weak as he

was, his eyes flashed, and he said, "No, sir; I will go out of the

front door or I'll die here." Of course after that every man in

the hospital worked for it, and in two weeks he was honorably

discharged. When he came home at last, his mother's heart was

broken to see him so wan and changed. She would tell us of the

long quiet days that followed his return, with the windows open so

that the dying eyes might look over the orchard slope to the

meadow beyond where the younger brothers were mowing the early

hay. She told us of those days when his school friends from the

Academy flocked in to see him, their old acknowledged leader, and

of the burning words of earnest patriotism spoken in the crowded

little room, so that in three months the Academy was almost

deserted and the new Company who marched away in the autumn took

as drummer boy Tommy's third brother, who was only seventeen and

too young for a regular. She remembered the still darker days

that followed, when the bright drummer boy was in Andersonville

prison, and little by little she learned to be reconciled that

Tommy was safe in the peaceful home graveyard.

However much we were given to talk of war heroes, we always fell

silent as we approached an isolated farmhouse in which two old

people lived alone. Five of their sons had enlisted in the Civil

War, and only the youngest had returned alive in the spring of

1865. In the autumn of the same year, when he was hunting for

wild ducks in a swamp on the rough little farm itself, he was

accidently shot and killed, and the old people were left alone to

struggle with the half-cleared land as best they might. When we

were driven past this forlorn little farm our childish voices

always dropped into speculative whisperings as to how the

accident could have happened to this remaining son out of all the

men in the world, to him who had escaped so many chances of

death! Our young hearts swelled in first rebellion against that

which Walter Pater calls "the inexplicable shortcoming or

misadventure on the part of life itself"; we were overwhelmingly

oppressed by that grief of things as they are, so much more

mysterious and intolerable than those griefs which we think dimly

to trace to man's own wrongdoing.

It was well perhaps that life thus early gave me a hint of one of

her most obstinate and insoluble riddles, for I have sorely

needed the sense of universality thus imparted to that mysterious

injustice, the burden of which we are all forced to bear and with

which I have become only too familiar.

My childish admiration for Lincoln is closely associated with a

visit made to the war eagle, Old Abe, who, as we children well

knew, lived in the state capital of Wisconsin, only sixty-five

miles north of our house, really no farther than an eagle could

easily fly! He had been carried by the Eighth Wisconsin Regiment

through the entire war, and now dwelt an honored pensioner in the

state building itself.

Many times, standing in the north end of our orchard, which was

only twelve miles from that mysterious line which divided

Illinois from Wisconsin, we anxiously scanned the deep sky,

hoping to see Old Abe fly southward right over our apple trees,

for it was clearly possible that he might at any moment escape

from his keeper, who, although he had been a soldier and a

sentinel, would have to sleep sometimes. We gazed with thrilled

interest at one speck after another in the flawless sky, but

although Old Abe never came to see us, a much more incredible

thing happened, for we were at last taken to see him.

We started one golden summer's day, two happy children in the

family carriage, with my father and mother and an older sister to

whom, because she was just home from boarding school, we

confidently appealed whenever we needed information. We were

driven northward hour after hour, past harvest fields in which

the stubble glinted from bronze to gold and the heavy-headed

grain rested luxuriously in rounded shocks, until we reached that

beautiful region of hills and lakes which surrounds the capital

city of Wisconsin.

But although Old Abe, sitting sedately upon his high perch, was

sufficiently like an uplifted ensign to remind us of a Roman

eagle, and although his veteran keeper, clad in an old army coat,

was ready to answer all our questions and to tell us of the

thirty-six battles and skirmishes which Old Abe had passed

unscathed, the crowning moment of the impressive journey came to

me later, illustrating once more that children are as quick to

catch the meaning of a symbol as they are unaccountably slow to

understand the real world about them.

The entire journey to the veteran war eagle had itself symbolized

that search for the heroic and perfect which so persistently

haunts the young; and as I stood under the great white dome of

Old Abe's stately home, for one brief moment the search was

rewarded. I dimly caught a hint of what men have tried to say in

their world-old effort to imprison a space in so divine a line

that it shall hold only yearning devotion and high-hearted hopes.

Certainly the utmost rim of my first dome was filled with the

tumultuous impression of soldiers marching to death for freedom's

sake, of pioneers streaming westward to establish self-government

in yet another sovereign state. Only the great dome of St.

Peter's itself has ever clutched my heart as did that modest

curve which had sequestered from infinitude in a place small

enough for my child's mind, the courage and endurance which I

could not comprehend so long as it was lost in "the void of

unresponsible space" under the vaulting sky itself. But through

all my vivid sensations there persisted the image of the eagle in

the corridor below and Lincoln himself as an epitome of all that

was great and good. I dimly caught the notion of the martyred

President as the standard bearer to the conscience of his

countrymen, as the eagle had been the ensign of courage to the

soldiers of the Wisconsin regiment.

Thirty-five years later, as I stood on the hill campus of the

University of Wisconsin with a commanding view of the capitol

building a mile directly across the city, I saw again the dome

which had so uplifted my childish spirit. The University, which

was celebrating it's fiftieth anniversary, had honored me with a

doctor's degree, and in the midst of the academic pomp and the

rejoicing, the dome again appeared to me as a fitting symbol of the

state's aspiration even in its high mission of universal education.

Thousands of children in the sixties and seventies, in the

simplicity which is given to the understanding of a child, caught a

notion of imperishable heroism when they were told that brave men

had lost their lives that the slaves might be free. At any moment

the conversation of our elders might turn upon these heroic events;

there were red-letter days, when a certain general came to see my

father, and again when Governor Oglesby, whom all Illinois children

called "Uncle Dick," spent a Sunday under the pine trees in our

front yard. We felt on those days a connection with the great

world so much more heroic than the village world which surrounded

us through all the other days. My father was a member of the state

senate for the sixteen years between 1854 and 1870, and even as a

little child I was dimly conscious of the grave march of public

affairs in his comings and goings at the state capital.

He was much too occupied to allow time for reminiscence, but I

remember overhearing a conversation between a visitor and himself

concerning the stirring days before the war, when it was by no

means certain that the Union men in the legislature would always

have enough votes to keep Illinois from seceding. I heard with

breathless interest my father's account of the trip a majority of

the legislators had made one dark day to St. Louis, that there

might not be enough men for a quorum, and so no vote could be

taken on the momentous question until the Union men could rally

their forces.

My father always spoke of the martyred President as Mr. Lincoln,

and I never heard the great name without a thrill. I remember

the day--it must have been one of comparative leisure, perhaps a

Sunday--when at my request my father took out of his desk a thin

packet marked "Mr. Lincoln's Letters," the shortest one of which

bore unmistakable traces of that remarkable personality. These

letters began, "My dear Double-D'ed Addams," and to the inquiry

as to how the person thus addressed was about to vote on a

certain measure then before the legislature, was added the

assurance that he knew that this Addams "would vote according to

his conscience," but he begged to know in which direction the

same conscience "was pointing." As my father folded up the bits

of paper I fairly held my breath in my desire that he should go

on with the reminiscence of this wonderful man, whom he had known

in his comparative obscurity, or better still, that he should be

moved to tell some of the exciting incidents of the

Lincoln-Douglas debates. There were at least two pictures of

Lincoln that always hung in my father's room, and one in our

old-fashioned upstairs parlor, of Lincoln with little Tad. For

one or all of these reasons I always tend to associate Lincoln

with the tenderest thoughts of my father.

I recall a time of great perplexity in the summer of 1894, when

Chicago was filled with federal troops sent there by the

President of the United States, and their presence was resented

by the governor of the state, that I walked the wearisome way

from Hull-House to Lincoln Park--for no cars were running

regularly at that moment of sympathetic strikes--in order to look

at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the marvelous

St. Gaudens statue which had been but recently been placed at the

entrance of the park. Some of Lincoln's immortal words were cut

into the stone at his feet, and never did a distracted town more

sorely need the healing of "with charity towards all" than did

Chicago at that moment, and the tolerance of the man who had won

charity for those on both sides of "an irrepressible conflict."

Of the many things written of my father in that sad August in

1881, when he died, the one I cared for most was written by an old

political friend of his who was then editor of a great Chicago

daily. He wrote that while there were doubtless many members of

the Illinois legislature who during the great contracts of the war

time and the demoralizing reconstruction days that followed, had

never accepted a bribe, he wished to bear testimony that he

personally had known but this one man who had never been offered a

bribe because bad men were instinctively afraid of him.

I feel now the hot chagrin with which I recalled this statement

during those early efforts of Illinois in which Hull- House

joined, to secure the passage of the first factory legislation. I

was told by the representatives of an informal association of

manufacturers that if the residents of Hull-House would drop this

nonsense about a sweatshop bill, of which they knew nothing,

certain business men would agree to give fifty thousand dollars

within two years to be used for any of the philanthropic

activities of the Settlement. As the fact broke upon me that I

was being offered a bribe, the shame was enormously increased by

the memory of this statement. What had befallen the daughter of

my father that such a thing could happen to her? The salutary

reflection that it could not have occurred unless a weakness in

myself had permitted it, withheld me at least from an historic

display of indignation before the two men making the offer, and I

explained as gently as I could that we had no ambition to make

Hull-House "the largest institution on the West Side," but that we

were much concerned that our neighbors should be protected from

untoward conditions of work, and--so much heroics, youth must

permit itself--if to accomplish this the destruction of Hull-House

was necessary, that we would cheerfully sing a Te Deum on its

ruins. The good friend who had invited me to lunch at the Union

League Club to meet two of his friends who wanted to talk over the

sweat shop bill here kindly intervened, and we all hastened to

cover the awkward situation by that scurrying away from ugly

morality which seems to be an obligation of social intercourse.

Of the many old friends of my father who kindly came to look up

his daughter in the first days of Hull-House, I recall none with

more pleasure than Lyman Trumbull, whom we used to point out to

members of the Young Citizen's Club as the man who had for days

held in his keeping the Proclamation of Emancipation until his

friend President Lincoln was ready to issue it. I remember the

talk he gave at Hull-House on one of our early celebrations of

Lincoln's birthday, his assertion that Lincoln was no cheap

popular hero, that the "common people" would have to make an

effort if they would understand his greatness, as Lincoln

painstakingly made a long effort to understand the greatness of

the people. There was something in the admiration of Lincoln's

contemporaries, or at least of those men who had known him

personally, which was quite unlike even the best of the devotion

and reverent understanding which has developed since. In the

first place, they had so large a fund of common experience; they

too had pioneered in a western country, and had urged the

development of canals and railroads in order that the raw prairie

crops might be transported to market; they too had realized that

if this last tremendous experiment in self-government failed here,

it would be the disappointment of the centuries and that upon

their ability to organize self-government in state, county, and

town depended the verdict of history. These men also knew, as

Lincoln himself did, that if this tremendous experiment was to

come to fruition, it must be brought about by the people

themselves; that there was no other capital fund upon which to

draw. I remember an incident occurring when I was about fifteen

years old, in which the conviction was driven into my mind that

the people themselves were the great resource of the country. My

father had made a little address of reminiscence at a meeting of

"the old settlers of Stephenson County," which was held every

summer in the grove beside the mill, relating his experiences in

inducing the farmers of the county to subscribe for stock in the

Northwestern Railroad, which was the first to penetrate the county

and make a connection with the Great Lakes at Chicago. Many of the

Pennsylvania German farmers doubted the value of "the whole

new-fangled business," and had no use for any railroad, much less

for one in which they were asked to risk their hard-earned

savings. My father told of his despair in one farmers' community

dominated by such prejudice which did not in the least give way

under his argument, but finally melted under the enthusiasm of a

high-spirited German matron who took a share to be paid for "out

of butter and egg money." As he related his admiration of her, an

old woman's piping voice in the audience called out: "I'm here

to-day, Mr. Addams, and I'd do it again if you asked me." The old

woman, bent and broken by her seventy years of toilsome life, was

brought to the platform and I was much impressed by my father's

grave presentation of her as "one of the public-spirited pioneers

to whose heroic fortitude we are indebted for the development of

this country." I remember that I was at that time reading with

great enthusiasm Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship," but on the

evening of "Old Settlers' Day," to my surprise, I found it

difficult to go on. Its sonorous sentences and exaltation of the

man who "can" suddenly ceased to be convincing. I had already

written down in my commonplace book a resolution to give at least

twenty-five copies of this book each year to noble young people of

my acquaintance. It is perhaps fitting in this chapter that the

very first Christmas we spent at Hull-House, in spite of exigent

demands upon my slender purse for candy and shoes, I gave to a

club of boys twenty-five copies of the then new Carl Schurz's

"Appreciation of Abraham Lincoln."

In our early effort at Hull-House to hand on to our neighbors

whatever of help we had found for ourselves, we made much of

Lincoln. We were often distressed by the children of immigrant

parents who were ashamed of the pit whence they were digged, who

repudiated the language and customs of their elders, and counted

themselves successful as they were able to ignore the past.

Whenever I held up Lincoln for their admiration as the greatest

American, I invariably pointed out his marvelous power to retain

and utilize past experiences; that he never forgot how the plain

people in Sangamon County thought and felt when he himself had

moved to town; that this habit was the foundation for his

marvelous capacity for growth; that during those distracting

years in Washington it enabled him to make clear beyond denial to

the American people themselves, the goal towards which they were

moving. I was sometimes bold enough to add that proficiency in

the art of recognition and comprehension did not come without

effort, and that certainly its attainment was necessary for any

successful career in our conglomerate America.

An instance of the invigorating and clarifying power of Lincoln's

influence came to me many years ago in England. I had spent two

days in Oxford under the guidance of Arnold Toynbee's old friend

Sidney Ball of St. John's College, who was closely associated

with the group of scholars we all identify with the beginnings of

the Settlement movement. It was easy to claim the philosophy of

Thomas Hill Green, the road-building episode of Ruskin, the

experimental living in the east end by Frederick Maurice, the

London Workingman's College of Edward Dennison, as foundations

laid by university men for the establishment of Toynbee Hall. I

was naturally much interested in the beginnings of the movement

whose slogan was "Back to the People," and which could doubtless

claim the Settlement as one of its manifestations. Nevertheless

the processes by which so simple a conclusion as residence among

the poor in East London was reached, seemed to me very involved

and roundabout. However inevitable these processes might be for

class-conscious Englishmen, they could not but seem artificial to

a western American who had been born in a rural community where

the early pioneer life had made social distinctions impossible.

Always on the alert lest American Settlements should become mere

echoes and imitations of the English movement, I found myself

assenting to what was shown me only with that part of my

consciousness which had been formed by reading of English social

movements, while at the same time the rustic American looked on

in detached comment.

Why should an American be lost in admiration of a group of Oxford

students because they went out to mend a disused road, inspired

thereto by Ruskin's teaching for the bettering of the common

life, when all the country roads in America were mended each

spring by self-respecting citizens, who were thus carrying out

the simple method devised by a democratic government for

providing highways. No humor penetrated my high mood even as I

somewhat uneasily recalled certain spring thaws when I had been

mired in roads provided by the American citizen. I continued to

fumble for a synthesis which I was unable to make until I

developed that uncomfortable sense of playing two roles at once.

It was therefore almost with a dual consciousness that I was

ushered, during the last afternoon of my Oxford stay, into the

drawingroom of the Master of Balliol. Edward Caird's "Evolution

of Religion," which I had read but a year or two before, had been

of unspeakable comfort to me in the labyrinth of differing

ethical teachings and religious creeds which the many immigrant

colonies of our neighborhood presented. I remember that I wanted

very much to ask the author himself how far it was reasonable to

expect the same quality of virtue and a similar standard of

conduct from these divers people. I was timidly trying to apply

his method of study to those groups of homesick immigrants

huddled together in strange tenement houses, among whom I seemed

to detect the beginnings of a secular religion or at least of a

wide humanitarianism evolved out of the various exigencies of the

situation; somewhat as a household of children, whose mother is

dead, out of their sudden necessity perform unaccustomed offices

for each other and awkwardly exchange consolations, as children

in happier households never dream of doing. Perhaps Mr. Caird

could tell me whether there was any religious content in this

Faith to each other; this fidelity

Of fellow wanderers in a desert place.

But when tea was over and my opportunity came for a talk with my

host, I suddenly remembered, to the exclusion of all other

associations, only Mr. Caird's fine analysis of Abraham Lincoln,

delivered in a lecture two years before.

The memory of Lincoln, the mention of his name, came like a

refreshing breeze from off the prairie, blowing aside all the

scholarly implications in which I had become so reluctantly

involved, and as the philosopher spoke of the great American "who

was content merely to dig the channels through which the moral life

of his countrymen might flow," I was gradually able to make a

natural connection between this intellectual penetration at Oxford

and the moral perception which is always necessary for the

discovery of new methods by which to minister to human needs. In

the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all

dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat

of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

Gradually a healing sense of well-being enveloped me and a quick

remorse for my blindness, as I realized that no one among his own

countrymen had been able to interpret Lincoln's greatness more

nobly than this Oxford scholar had done, and that vision and

wisdom as well as high motives must lie behind every effective

stroke in the continuous labor for human equality; I remembered

that another Master of Balliol, Jowett himself, had said that it

was fortunate for society that every age possessed at least a few

minds, which, like Arnold Toynbee's, were "perpetually disturbed

over the apparent inequalities of mankind." Certainly both the

English and American settlements could unite in confessing to

that disturbance of mind.

Traces of this Oxford visit are curiously reflected in a paper I

wrote soon after my return at the request of the American Academy

of Political and Social Science. It begins as follows:--

The word "settlement," which we have borrowed from London,

is apt to grate a little upon American ears. It is not,

after all, so long ago that Americans who settled were

those who had adventured into a new country, where they

were pioneers in the midst of difficult surroundings. The

word still implies migrating from one condition of life to

another totally unlike it, and against this implication

the resident of an American settlement takes alarm.

We do not like to acknowledge that Americans are divided

into two nations, as her prime minister once admitted of

England. We are not willing, openly and professedly, to

assume that American citizens are broken up into classes,

even if we make that assumption the preface to a plea that

the superior class has duties to the inferior. Our

democracy is still our most precious possession, and we do

well to resent any inroads upon it, even though they may

be made in the name of philanthropy.

Is it not Abraham Lincoln who has cleared the title to our

democracy? He made plain, once for all, that democratic

government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and

shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable

contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Diana Camden.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter III: Boarding-School Ideals." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.

43-64.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER III

BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS

As my three older sisters had already attended the seminary at

Rockford, of which my father was trustee, without any question I

entered there at seventeen, with such meager preparation in Latin

and algebra as the village school had afforded. I was very

ambitious to go to Smith College, although I well knew that my

father's theory in regard to the education of his daughters

implied a school as near at home as possible, to be followed by

travel abroad in lieu of the wider advantages which the eastern

college is supposed to afford. I was much impressed by the

recent return of my sister from a year in Europe, yet I was

greatly disappointed at the moment of starting to humdrum

Rockford. After the first weeks of homesickness were over,

however, I became very much absorbed in the little world which

the boarding school in any form always offers to its students.

The school at Rockford in 1877 had not changed its name from

seminary to college, although it numbered, on its faculty and

among its alumnae, college women who were most eager that this

should be done, and who really accomplished it during the next

five years. The school was one of the earliest efforts for

women's higher education in the Mississippi Valley, and from the

beginning was called "The Mount Holyoke of the West."

It reflected much of the missionary spirit of that pioneer

institution, and the proportion of missionaries among its early

graduates was almost as large as Mount Holyoke's own. In

addition there had been thrown about the founders of the early

western school the glamour of frontier privations, and the first

students, conscious of the heroic self-sacrifice made in their

behalf, felt that each minute of the time thus dearly bought must

be conscientiously used. This inevitably fostered an atmosphere

of intensity, a fever of preparation which continued long after

the direct making of it had ceased, and which the later girls

accepted, as they did the campus and the buildings, without

knowing that it could have been otherwise.

There was, moreover, always present in the school a larger or

smaller group of girls who consciously accepted this heritage and

persistently endeavored to fulfill its obligation. We worked in

those early years as if we really believed the portentous

statement from Aristotle which we found quoted in Boswell's

Johnson and with which we illuminated the wall of the room

occupied by our Chess Club; it remained there for months, solely

out of reverence, let us hope, for the two ponderous names

associated with it; at least I have enough confidence in human

nature to assert that we never really believed that "There is the

same difference between the learned and the unlearned as there is

between the living and the dead." We were also too fond of quoting

Carlyle to the effect, "'Tis not to taste sweet things, but to do

noble and true things that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs."

As I attempt to reconstruct the spirit of my contemporary group

by looking over many documents, I find nothing more amusing than

a plaint registered against life's indistinctness, which I

imagine more or less reflected the sentiments of all of us. At

any rate here it is for the entertainment of the reader if not

for his edification: "So much of our time is spent in

preparation, so much in routine, and so much in sleep, we find it

difficult to have any experience at all." We did not, however,

tamely accept such a state of affairs, for we made various and

restless attempts to break through this dull obtuseness.

At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous

"Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium.

We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an

entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and

the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow

sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young

teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence,

grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey

and all the remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of

the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human

experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern

command to appear at family worship after supper "whether we were

able to or not."

Whenever we had a chance to write, we took, of course, large

themes, usually from the Greek because they were the most

stirring to the imagination. The Greek oration I gave at our

Junior Exhibition was written with infinite pains and taken to

the Greek professor in Beloit College that there might be no

mistakes, even after the Rockford College teacher and the most

scholarly clergyman in town had both passed upon it. The oration

upon Bellerophon and his successful fight with the Chimera

contended that social evils could only be overcome by him who

soared above them into idealism, as Bellerophon mounted upon the

winged horse Pegasus, had slain the earthy dragon.

There were practically no Economics taught in women's colleges--at

least in the fresh-water ones--thirty years ago, although we

painstakingly studied "Mental" and "Moral" Philosophy, which,

though far from dry in the classroom, became the subject of more

spirited discussion outside, and gave us a clew for animated

rummaging in the little college library. Of course we read a

great deal of Ruskin and Browning, and liked the most abstruse

parts the best; but like the famous gentleman who talked prose

without knowing it, we never dreamed of connecting them with our

philosophy. My genuine interest was history, partly because of a

superior teacher, and partly because my father had always insisted

upon a certain amount of historic reading ever since he had paid

me, as a little girl, five cents a "Life" for each Plutarch hero I

could intelligently report to him and twenty-five cents for every

volume of Irving's "Life of Washington."

When we started for the long vacations, a little group of five

would vow that during the summer we would read all of Motley's

"Dutch Republic" or, more ambitious still, all of Gibbon's

"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." When we returned at the

opening of school and three of us announced we had finished the

latter, each became skeptical of the other two. We fell upon

each other in a sort of rough-and-tumble examination, in which no

quarter was given or received; but the suspicion was finally

removed that anyone had skipped. We took for a class motto the

early Saxon word for lady, translated into breadgiver, and we

took for our class color the poppy, because poppies grow among

the wheat, as if Nature knew that wherever there was hunger that

needed food there would be pain that needed relief. We must have

found the sentiment in a book somewhere, but we used it so much

it finally seemed like an idea of our own, although of course

none of us had ever seen a European field, the only page upon

which Nature has written this particular message.

That this group of ardent girls, who discussed everything under

the sun with unabated interest, did not take it all out in talk

may be demonstrated by the fact that one of the class who married

a missionary founded a very successful school in Japan for the

children of the English and Americans living there; another of

the class became a medical missionary to Korea, and because of

her successful treatment of the Queen, was made court physician

at a time when the opening was considered of importance in the

diplomatic as well as in the missionary world; still another

became an unusually skilled teacher of the blind; and one of them

a pioneer librarian in that early effort to bring "books to the

people."

Perhaps this early companionship showed me how essentially

similar are the various forms of social effort, and curiously

enough, the actual activities of a missionary school are not

unlike many that are carried on in a Settlement situated in a

foreign quarter. Certainly the most sympathetic and

comprehending visitors we have ever had at Hull-House have been

returned missionaries; among them two elderly ladies, who had

lived for years in India and who had been homesick and bewildered

since their return, declared that the fortnight at Hull-House had

been the happiest and most familiar they had had in America.

Of course in such an atmosphere a girl like myself, of serious

not to say priggish tendency, did not escape a concerted pressure

to push her into the "missionary field." During the four years it

was inevitable that every sort of evangelical appeal should have

been made to reach the comparatively few "unconverted" girls in

the school. We were the subject of prayer at the daily chapel

exercise and the weekly prayer meeting, attendance upon which was

obligatory.

I was singularly unresponsive to all these forms of emotional

appeal, although I became unspeakably embarrassed when they were

presented to me at close range by a teacher during the "silent

hour," which we were all required to observe every evening, and

which was never broken into, even by a member of the faculty,

unless the errand was one of grave import. I found these

occasional interviews on the part of one of the more serious

young teachers, of whom I was extremely fond, hard to endure, as

was a long series of conversations in my senior year conducted by

one of the most enthusiastic members of the faculty, in which the

desirability of Turkey as a field for missionary labor was

enticingly put before me. I suppose I held myself aloof from all

these influences, partly owing to the fact that my father was not

a communicant of any church, and I tremendously admired his

scrupulous morality and sense of honor in all matters of personal

and public conduct, and also because the little group to which I

have referred was much given to a sort of rationalism, doubtless

founded upon an early reading of Emerson. In this connection,

when Bronson Alcott came to lecture at the school, we all vied

with each other for a chance to do him a personal service because

he had been a friend of Emerson, and we were inexpressibly

scornful of our younger fellow-students who cared for him merely

on the basis of his grandfatherly relation to "Little Women." I

recall cleaning the clay of the unpaved streets off his heavy

cloth overshoes in a state of ecstatic energy.

But I think in my case there were other factors as well that

contributed to my unresponsiveness to the evangelical appeal. A

curious course of reading I had marked out for myself in medieval

history, seems to have left me fascinated by an ideal of mingled

learning, piety and physical labor, more nearly exemplified by

the Port Royalists than by any others.

The only moments in which I seem to have approximated in my own

experience to a faint realization of the "beauty of holiness," as

I conceived it, was each Sunday morning between the hours of nine

and ten, when I went into the exquisitely neat room of the

teacher of Greek and read with her from a Greek testament. We

did this every Sunday morning for two years. It was not exactly

a lesson, for I never prepared for it, and while I was held

within reasonable bounds of syntax, I was allowed much more

freedom in translation than was permitted the next morning when I

read Homer; neither did we discuss doctrines, for although it was

with this same teacher that in our junior year we studied Paul's

Epistle to the Hebrews, committing all of it to memory and

analyzing and reducing it to doctrines within an inch of our

lives, we never allowed an echo of this exercise to appear at

these blessed Sunday morning readings. It was as if the

disputations of Paul had not yet been, for we always read from

the Gospels. The regime of Rockford Seminary was still very

simple in the 70's. Each student made her own fire and kept her

own room in order. Sunday morning was a great clearing up day,

and the sense of having made immaculate my own immediate

surroundings, the consciousness of clean linen, said to be close

to the consciousness of a clean conscience, always mingles in my

mind with these early readings. I certainly bore away with me a

lifelong enthusiasm for reading the Gospels in bulk, a whole one

at a time, and an insurmountable distaste for having them cut up

into chapter and verse, or for hearing the incidents in that

wonderful Life thus referred to as if it were merely a record.

My copy of the Greek testament had been presented to me by the

brother of our Greek teacher, Professor Blaisdell of Beloit

College, a true scholar in "Christian Ethics," as his department

was called. I recall that one day in the summer after I left

college--one of the black days which followed the death of my

father--this kindly scholar came to see me in order to bring such

comfort as he might and to inquire how far I had found solace in

the little book he had given me so long before. When I suddenly

recall the village in which I was born, its steeples and roofs

look as they did that day from the hilltop where we talked

together, the familiar details smoothed out and merging, as it

were, into that wide conception of the universe, which for the

moment swallowed up my personal grief or at least assuaged it with

a realization that it was but a drop in that "torrent of sorrow

and aguish and terror which flows under all the footsteps of man."

This realization of sorrow as the common lot, of death as the

universal experience, was the first comfort which my bruised

spirit had received. In reply to my impatience with the Christian

doctrine of "resignation," that it implied that you thought of

your sorrow only in its effect upon you and were disloyal to the

affection itself, I remember how quietly the Christian scholar

changed his phraseology, saying that sometimes consolation came to

us better in the words of Plato, and, as nearly as I can remember,

that was the first time I had ever heard Plato's sonorous argument

for the permanence of the excellent.

When Professor Blaisdell returned to his college, he left in my

hands a small copy of "The Crito." The Greek was too hard for me,

and I was speedily driven to Jowett's translation. That

old-fashioned habit of presenting favorite books to eager young

people, although it degenerated into the absurdity of

"friendship's offerings," had much to be said for it, when it

indicated the wellsprings of literature from which the donor

himself had drawn waters of healing and inspiration.

Throughout our school years, we were always keenly conscious of

the growing development of Rockford Seminary into a college. The

opportunity for our Alma Mater to take her place in the new

movement of full college education for women filled us with

enthusiasm, and it became a driving ambition with the

undergraduates to share in this new and glorious undertaking. We

gravely decided that it was important that some of the students

should be ready to receive the bachelor's degree the very first

moment that the charter of the school should secure the right to

confer it. Two of us, therefore, took a course in mathematics,

advanced beyond anything previously given in the school, from one

of those early young women working for a Ph.D., who was

temporarily teaching in Rockford that she might study more

mathematics in Leipsic.

My companion in all these arduous labors has since accomplished

more than any of us in the effort to procure the franchise for

women, for even then we all took for granted the righteousness of

that cause into which I at least had merely followed my father's

conviction. In the old-fashioned spirit of that cause I might

cite the career of this companion as an illustration of the

efficacy of higher mathematics for women, for she possesses

singular ability to convince even the densest legislators of their

legal right to define their own electorate, even when they quote

against her the dustiest of state constitutions or city charters.

In line with this policy of placing a woman's college on an

equality with the other colleges of the state, we applied for an

opportunity to compete in the intercollegiate oratorical contest

of Illinois, and we succeeded in having Rockford admitted as the

first woman's college. When I was finally selected as the

orator, I was somewhat dismayed to find that, representing not

only one school but college women in general, I could not resent

the brutal frankness with which my oratorical possibilities were

discussed by the enthusiastic group who would allow no personal

feeling to stand in the way of progress, especially the progress

of Woman's Cause. I was told among other things that I had an

intolerable habit of dropping my voice at the end of a sentence

in the most feminine, apologetic and even deprecatory manner

which would probably lose Woman the first place.

Woman certainly did lose the first place and stood fifth, exactly

in the dreary middle, but the ignominious position may not have

been solely due to bad mannerisms, for a prior place was easily

accorded to William Jennings Bryan, who not only thrilled his

auditors with an almost prophetic anticipation of the cross of

gold, but with a moral earnestness which we had mistakenly

assumed would be the unique possession of the feminine orator.

I so heartily concurred with the decision of the judges of the

contest that it was with a care-free mind that I induced my

colleague and alternate to remain long enough in "The Athens of

Illinois," in which the successful college was situated, to visit

the state institutions, one for the Blind and one for the Deaf and

Dumb. Dr Gillette was at that time head of the latter

institution; his scholarly explanation of the method of teaching,

his concern for his charges, this sudden demonstration of the care

the state bestowed upon its most unfortunate children, filled me

with grave speculations in which the first, the fifth, or the

ninth place in the oratorical contest seemed of little moment.

However, this brief delay between our field of Waterloo and our

arrival at our aspiring college turned out to be most

unfortunate, for we found the ardent group not only exhausted by

the premature preparations for the return of a successful orator,

but naturally much irritated as they contemplated their garlands

drooping disconsolately in tubs and bowls of water. They did not

fail to make me realize that I had dealt the cause of woman's

advancement a staggering blow, and all my explanations of the

fifth place were haughtily considered insufficient before that

golden Bar of Youth, so absurdly inflexible!

To return to my last year of school, it was inevitable that the

pressure toward religious profession should increase as

graduating day approached. So curious, however, are the paths of

moral development that several times during subsequent

experiences have I felt that this passive resistance of mine,

this clinging to an individual conviction, was the best moral

training I received at Rockford College. During the first decade

of Hull-House, it was felt by propagandists of diverse social

theories that the new Settlement would be a fine coign of vantage

from which to propagate social faiths, and that a mere

preliminary step would be the conversion of the founders; hence I

have been reasoned with hours at a time, and I recall at least

three occasions when this was followed by actual prayer. In the

first instance, the honest exhorter who fell upon his knees

before my astonished eyes, was an advocate of single tax upon

land values. He begged, in that phraseology which is deemed

appropriate for prayer, that "the sister might see the beneficent

results it would bring to the poor who live in the awful

congested districts around this very house."

The early socialists used every method of attack,--a favorite one

being the statement, doubtless sometimes honestly made, that I

really was a socialist, but "too much of a coward to say so." I

remember one socialist who habitually opened a very telling

address he was in the habit of giving upon the street corners, by

holding me up as an awful example to his fellow socialists, as

one of their number "who had been caught in the toils of

capitalism." He always added as a final clinching of the

statement that he knew what he was talking about because he was a

member of the Hull-House Men's Club. When I ventured to say to

him that not all of the thousands of people who belong to a class

or club at Hull-House could possibly know my personal opinions,

and to mildly inquire upon what he founded his assertions, he

triumphantly replied that I had once admitted to him that I had

read Sombart and Loria, and that anyone of sound mind must see

the inevitable conclusions of such master reasonings.

I could multiply these two instances a hundredfold, and possibly

nothing aided me to stand on my own feet and to select what

seemed reasonable from this wilderness of dogma, so much as my

early encounter with genuine zeal and affectionate solicitude,

associated with what I could not accept as the whole truth.

I do not wish to take callow writing too seriously, but I reproduce

from an oratorical contest the following bit of premature

pragmatism, doubtless due much more to temperament than to

perception, because I am still ready to subscribe to it, although

the grandiloquent style is, I hope, a thing of the past: "Those who

believe that Justice is but a poetical longing within us, the

enthusiast who thinks it will come in the form of a millennium,

those who see it established by the strong arm of a hero, are not

those who have comprehended the vast truths of life. The actual

Justice must come by trained intelligence, by broadened sympathies

toward the individual man or woman who crosses our path; one item

added to another is the only method by which to build up a

conception lofty enough to be of use in the world."

This schoolgirl recipe has been tested in many later experiences,

the most dramatic of which came when I was called upon by a

manufacturing company to act as one of three arbitrators in a

perplexing struggle between themselves, a group of

trade-unionists and a non-union employee of their establishment.

The non-union man who was the cause of the difficulty had ten

years before sided with his employers in a prolonged strike and

had bitterly fought the union. He had been so badly injured at

that time, that in spite of long months of hospital care he had

never afterward been able to do a full day's work, although his

employers had retained him for a decade at full pay in

recognition of his loyalty. At the end of ten years the once

defeated union was strong enough to enforce its demands for a

union shop and in spite of the distaste of the firm for the

arrangement, no obstacle to harmonious relations with the union

remained but for the refusal of the trade-unionists to receive as

one of their members the old crippled employee, whose spirit was

broken as last and who was now willing to join the union and to

stand with his old enemies for the sake of retaining his place.

But the union men would not receive "a traitor," the firm flatly

refused to dismiss so faithful an employee, the busy season was

upon them, and everyone concerned had finally agreed to abide

without appeal by the decision of the arbitrators. The chairman

of our little arbitration committee, a venerable judge, quickly

demonstrated that it was impossible to collect trustworthy

evidence in regards to the events already ten years old which lay

at the bottom of this bitterness, and we soon therefore ceased to

interview the conflicting witnesses; the second member of the

committee sternly bade the men remember that the most ancient

Hebraic authority gave no sanction for holding even a just

resentment for more than seven years, and at last we all settled

down to that wearisome effort to secure the inner consent of all

concerned, upon which alone the "mystery of justice" as

Maeterlinck has told us, ultimately depends. I am not quite sure

that in the end we administered justice, but certainly employers,

trade-unionists, and arbitrators were all convinced that justice

will have to be established in industrial affairs with the same

care and patience which has been necessary for centuries in order

to institute it in men's civic relationships, although as the

judge remarked the search must be conducted without much help

from precedent. The conviction remained with me, that however

long a time might be required to establish justice in the new

relationships of our raw industrialism, it would never be stable

until it had received the sanction of those upon whom the present

situation presses so harshly.

Towards the end of our four years' course we debated much as to

what we were to be, and long before the end of my school days it

was quite settled in my mind that I should study medicine and

"live with the poor." This conclusion of course was the result of

many things, perhaps epitomized in my graduating essay on

"Cassandra" and her tragic fate "always to be in the right, and

always to be disbelieved and rejected."

This state of affairs, it may readily be guessed, the essay held

to be an example of the feminine trait of mind called intuition,

"an accurate perception of Truth and Justice, which rests

contented in itself and will make no effort to confirm itself or

to organize through existing knowledge." The essay then

proceeds--I am forced to admit, with overmuch conviction--with

the statement that women can only "grow accurate and intelligible

by the thorough study of at least one branch of physical science,

for only with eyes thus accustomed to the search for truth can

she detect all self-deceit and fancy in herself and learn to

express herself without dogmatism." So much for the first part of

the thesis. Having thus "gained accuracy, would woman bring this

force to bear throughout morals and justice, then she must find

in active labor the promptings and inspirations that come from

growing insight." I was quite certain that by following these

directions carefully, in the end the contemporary woman would

find "her faculties clear and acute from the study of science,

and her hand upon the magnetic chain of humanity."

This veneration for science portrayed in my final essay was

doubtless the result of the statements the textbooks were then

making of what was called the theory of evolution, the acceptance

of which even thirty years after the publication of Darwin's

"Origin of Species" had about it a touch of intellectual

adventure. We knew, for instance, that our science teacher had

accepted this theory, but we had a strong suspicion that the

teacher of Butler's "Analogy" had not. We chafed at the

meagerness of the college library in this direction, and I used

to bring back in my handbag books belonging to an advanced

brother-in-law who had studied medicine in Germany and who

therefore was quite emancipated. The first gift I made when I

came into possession of my small estate the year after I left

school, was a thousand dollars to the library of Rockford

College, with the stipulation that it be spent for scientific

books. In the long vacations I pressed plants, stuffed birds and

pounded rocks in some vague belief that I was approximating the

new method, and yet when my stepbrother who was becoming a real

scientist, tried to carry me along with him to the merest outskirts

of the methods of research, it at once became evident that I had

no aptitude and was unable to follow intelligently Darwin's

careful observations on the earthworm. I made a heroic effort,

although candor compels me to state that I never would have

finished if I had not been pulled and pushed by my really ardent

companion, who in addition to a multitude of earthworms and a fine

microscope, possessed untiring tact with one of flagging zeal.

As our boarding-school days neared the end, in the consciousness

of approaching separation we vowed eternal allegiance to our

"early ideals," and promised each other we would "never abandon

them without conscious justification," and we often warned each

other of "the perils of self-tradition."

We believed, in our sublime self-conceit, that the difficulty of

life would lie solely in the direction of losing these precious

ideals of ours, of failing to follow the way of martyrdom and

high purpose we had marked out for ourselves, and we had no

notion of the obscure paths of tolerance, just allowance, and

self-blame wherein, if we held our minds open, we might learn

something of the mystery and complexity of life's purposes.

The year after I had left college I came back, with a classmate,

to receive the degree we had so eagerly anticipated. Two of the

graduating class were also ready and four of us were dubbed B.A.

on the very day that Rockford Seminary was declared a college in

the midst of tumultuous anticipations. Having had a year outside

of college walls in that trying land between vague hope and

definite attainment, I had become very much sobered in my desire

for a degree, and was already beginning to emerge from that

rose-colored mist with which the dream of youth so readily

envelops the future.

Whatever may have been the perils of self-tradition, I certainly

did not escape them, for it required eight years--from the time I

left Rockford in the summer of 1881 until Hull-House was opened

in the the autumn of 1889--to formulate my convictions even in

the least satisfactory manner, much less to reduce them to a plan

for action. During most of that time I was absolutely at sea so

far as any moral purpose was concerned, clinging only to the

desire to live in a really living world and refusing to be content

with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Diana Camden.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter IV: The Snare of Preparation." by Jane Addams

(1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 65-88.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER IV

THE SNARE OF PREPARATION

The winter after I left school was spent in the Woman's Medical

College of Philadelphia, but the development of the spinal

difficulty which had shadowed me from childhood forced me into Dr.

Weir Mitchell's hospital for the late spring, and the next winter I

was literally bound to a bed in my sister's house for six months.

In spite of its tedium, the long winter had its mitigations, for

after the first few weeks I was able to read with a luxurious

consciousness of leisure, and I remember opening the first volume

of Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" with a lively sense of gratitude

that it was not Gray's "Anatomy," having found, like many another,

that general culture is a much easier undertaking than professional

study. The long illness inevitably put aside the immediate

prosecution of a medical course, and although I had passed my

examinations creditably enough in the required subjects for the

first year, I was very glad to have a physician's sanction for

giving up clinics and dissecting rooms and to follow his

prescription of spending the next two years in Europe.

Before I returned to America I had discovered that there were

other genuine reasons for living among the poor than that of

practicing medicine upon them, and my brief foray into the

profession was never resumed.

The long illness left me in a state of nervous exhaustion with

which I struggled for years, traces of it remaining long after

Hull-House was opened in 1889. At the best it allowed me but a

limited amount of energy, so that doubtless there was much

nervous depression at the foundation of the spiritual struggles

which this chapter is forced to record. However, it could not

have been all due to my health, for as my wise little notebook

sententiously remarked, "In his own way each man must struggle,

lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated

from his active life."

It would, of course, be impossible to remember that some of these

struggles ever took place at all, were it not for these selfsame

notebooks, in which, however, I no longer wrote in moments of

high resolve, but judging from the internal evidence afforded by

the books themselves, only in moments of deep depression when

overwhelmed by a sense of failure.

One of the most poignant of these experiences, which occurred

during the first few months after our landing upon the other side

of the Atlantic, was on a Saturday night, when I received an

ineradicable impression of the wretchedness of East London, and

also saw for the first time the overcrowded quarters of a great

city at midnight. A small party of tourists were taken to the

East End by a city missionary to witness the Saturday night sale

of decaying vegetables and fruit, which, owing to the Sunday laws

in London, could not be sold until Monday, and, as they were

beyond safe keeping, were disposed of at auction as late as

possible on Saturday night. On Mile End Road, from the top of an

omnibus which paused at the end of a dingy street lighted by only

occasional flares of gas, we saw two huge masses of ill-clad

people clamoring around two hucksters' carts. They were bidding

their farthings and ha'pennies for a vegetable held up by the

auctioneer, which he at last scornfully flung, with a gibe for

its cheapness, to the successful bidder. In the momentary pause

only one man detached himself from the groups. He had bidden in

a cabbage, and when it struck his hand, he instantly sat down on

the curb, tore it with his teeth, and hastily devoured it,

unwashed and uncooked as it was. He and his fellows were types

of the "submerged tenth," as our missionary guide told us, with

some little satisfaction in the then new phrase, and he further

added that so many of them could scarcely be seen in one spot

save at this Saturday night auction, the desire for cheap food

being apparently the one thing which could move them

simultaneously. They were huddled into ill-fitting, cast-off

clothing, the ragged finery which one sees only in East London.

Their pale faces were dominated by that most unlovely of human

expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain-hunter who

starves if he cannot make a successful trade, and yet the final

impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and

sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless

and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the street,

and clutching forward for food which was already unfit to eat.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human

hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from

savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward. I

have never since been able to see a number of hands held upward,

even when they are moving rhythmically in a calisthenic exercise,

or when they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them

in eager response to a teacher's query, without a certain revival

of this memory, a clutching at the heart reminiscent of the

despair and resentment which seized me then.

For the following weeks I went about London almost furtively,

afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose

again this hideous human need and suffering. I carried with me

for days at a time that curious surprise we experience when we

first come back into the streets after days given over to sorrow

and death; we are bewildered that the world should be going on as

usual and unable to determine which is real, the inner pang or the

outward seeming. In time all huge London came to seem unreal save

the poverty in its East End. During the following two years on

the continent, while I was irresistibly drawn to the poorer

quarters of each city, nothing among the beggars of South Italy

nor among the salt miners of Austria carried with it the same

conviction of human wretchedness which was conveyed by this

momentary glimpse of an East London street. It was, of course, a

most fragmentary and lurid view of the poverty of East London, and

quite unfair. I should have been shown either less or more, for I

went away with no notion of the hundreds of men and women who had

gallantly identified their fortunes with these empty-handed

people, and who, in church and chapel, "relief works," and

charities, were at least making an effort towards its mitigation.

Our visit was made in November, 1883, the very year when the Pall

Mall Gazette exposure started "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,"

and the conscience of England was stirred as never before over

this joyless city in the East End of its capital. Even then,

vigorous and drastic plans were being discussed, and a splendid

program of municipal reforms was already dimly outlined. Of all

these, however, I had heard nothing but the vaguest rumor.

No comfort came to me then from any source, and the painful

impression was increased because at the very moment of looking

down the East London street from the top of the omnibus, I had

been sharply and painfully reminded of "The Vision of Sudden

Death" which had confronted De Quincey one summer's night as he

was being driven through rural England on a high mail coach. Two

absorbed lovers suddenly appear between the narrow, blossoming

hedgerows in the direct path of the huge vehicle which is sure to

crush them to their death. De Quincey tries to send them a

warning shout, but finds himself unable to make a sound because

his mind is hopelessly entangled in an endeavor to recall the

exact lines from the Iliad which describe the great cry with

which Achilles alarmed all Asia militant. Only after his memory

responds is his will released from its momentary paralysis, and

he rides on through the fragrant night with the horror of the

escaped calamity thick upon him, but he also bears with him the

consciousness that he had given himself over so many years to

classic learning--that when suddenly called upon for a quick

decision in the world of life and death, he had been able to act

only through a literary suggestion.

This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with

literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation

spread before our eyes. It seemed to me too preposterous that in

my first view of the horror of East London I should have recalled

De Quincey's literary description of the literary suggestion

which had once paralyzed him. In my disgust it all appeared a

hateful, vicious circle which even the apostles of culture

themselves admitted, for had not one of the greatest among the

moderns plainly said that "conduct, and not culture is three

fourths of human life."

For two years in the midst of my distress over the poverty which,

thus suddenly driven into my consciousness, had become to me the

"Weltschmerz," there was mingled a sense of futility, of

misdirected energy, the belief that the pursuit of cultivation

would not in the end bring either solace or relief. I gradually

reached a conviction that the first generation of college women

had taken their learning too quickly, had departed too suddenly

from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and

great-grandmothers; that the contemporary education of young

women had developed too exclusively the power of acquiring

knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere in

the process of 'being educated' they had lost that simple and

almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful

reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of

suffering or of helplessness; that they are so sheltered and

pampered they have no chance even to make "the great refusal."

In the German and French pensions, which twenty-five years ago

were crowded with American mothers and their daughters who had

crossed the seas in search of culture, one often found the mother

making real connection with the life about her, using her

inadequate German with great fluency, gaily measuring the

enormous sheets or exchanging recipes with the German Hausfrau,

visiting impartially the nearest kindergarten and market, making

an atmosphere of her own, hearty and genuine as far as it went,

in the house and on the street. On the other hand, her daughter

was critical and uncertain of her linguistic acquirements, and

only at ease when in the familiar receptive attitude afforded by

the art gallery and opera house. In the latter she was swayed

and moved, appreciative of the power and charm of the music,

intelligent as to the legend and poetry of the plot, finding use

for her trained and developed powers as she sat "being

cultivated" in the familiar atmosphere of the classroom which

had, as it were, become sublimated and romanticized.

I remember a happy busy mother who, complacent with the knowledge

that her daughter daily devoted four hours to her music, looked up

from her knitting to say, "If I had had your opportunities when I

was young, my dear, I should have been a very happy girl. I always

had musical talent, but such training as I had, foolish little

songs and waltzes and not time for half an hour's practice a day."

The mother did not dream of the sting her words left and that the

sensitive girl appreciated only too well that her opportunities

were fine and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of some

facility and much good teaching she had no genuine talent and

never would fulfill the expectations of her friends. She looked

back upon her mother's girlhood with positive envy because it was

so full of happy industry and extenuating obstacles, with

undisturbed opportunity to believe that her talents were unusual.

The girl looked wistfully at her mother, but had not the courage

to cry out what was in her heart: "I might believe I had unusual

talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half

an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the

time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties

are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages.

It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning."

This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning

and the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing

to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which

is all about her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for

it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which

overwhelms her; it peers at her in the form of heavy-laden market

women and underpaid street laborers, gibing her with a sense of

her uselessness.

I recall one snowy morning in Saxe-Coburg, looking from the window

of our little hotel upon the town square, that we saw crossing and

recrossing it a single file of women with semicircular, heavy,

wooden tanks fastened upon their backs. They were carrying in this

primitive fashion to a remote cooling room these tanks filled with

a hot brew incident to one stage of beer making. The women were

bent forward, not only under the weight which they were bearing,

but because the tanks were so high that it would have been

impossible for them to have lifted their heads. Their faces and

hands, reddened in the cold morning air, showed clearly the white

scars where they had previously been scalded by the hot stuff which

splashed if they stumbled ever so little on their way. Stung into

action by one of those sudden indignations against cruel conditions

which at times fill the young with unexpected energy, I found

myself across the square, in company with mine host, interviewing

the phlegmatic owner of the brewery who received us with

exasperating indifference, or rather received me, for the innkeeper

mysteriously slunk away as soon as the great magnate of the town

began to speak. I went back to a breakfast for which I had lost my

appetite, as I had for Gray's "Life of Prince Albert" and his

wonderful tutor, Baron Stockmar, which I had been reading late the

night before. The book had lost its fascination; how could a good

man, feeling so keenly his obligation "to make princely the mind of

his prince," ignore such conditions of life for the multitude of

humble, hard-working folk. We were spending two months in Dresden

that winter, given over to much reading of "The History of Art" and

after such an experience I would invariably suffer a moral

revulsion against this feverish search after culture. It was

doubtless in such moods that I founded my admiration for Albrecht

Durer, taking his wonderful pictures, however, in the most

unorthodox manner, merely as human documents. I was chiefly

appealed to by his unwillingness to lend himself to a smooth and

cultivated view of life, by his determination to record its

frustrations and even the hideous forms which darken the day for

our human imagination and to ignore no human complications. I

believed that his canvases intimated the coming religious and

social changes of the Reformation and the peasants' wars, that they

were surcharged with pity for the downtrodden, that his sad

knights, gravely standing guard, were longing to avert that

shedding of blood which is sure to occur when men forget how

complicated life is and insist upon reducing it to logical dogmas.

The largest sum of money that I ever ventured to spend in Europe

was for an engraving of his "St. Hubert," the background of which

was said to be from an original Durer plate. There is little

doubt, I am afraid, that the background as well as the figures

"were put in at a later date," but the purchase at least

registered the high-water mark of my enthusiasm.

The wonder and beauty of Italy later brought healing and some

relief to the paralyzing sense of the futility of all artistic

and intellectual effort when disconnected from the ultimate test

of the conduct it inspired. The serene and soothing touch of

history also aroused old enthusiasms, although some of their

manifestations were such as one smiles over more easily in

retrospection than at the moment. I fancy that it was no smiling

matter to several people in our party, whom I induced to walk for

three miles in the hot sunshine beating down upon the Roman

Campagna, that we might enter the Eternal City on foot through

the Porta del Popolo, as pilgrims had done for centuries. To be

sure, we had really entered Rome the night before, but the

railroad station and the hotel might have been anywhere else, and

we had been driven beyond the walls after breakfast and stranded

at the very spot where the pilgrims always said "Ecco Roma," as

they caught the first glimpse of St. Peter's dome. This

melodramatic entrance into Rome, or rather pretended entrance,

was the prelude to days of enchantment, and I returned to Europe

two years later in order to spend a winter there and to carry out

a great desire to systematically study the Catacombs. In spite of

my distrust of "advantages" I was apparently not yet so cured but

that I wanted more of them.

The two years which elapsed before I again found myself in Europe

brought their inevitable changes. Family arrangements had so

come about that I had spent three or four months of each of the

intervening winters in Baltimore, where I seemed to have reached

the nadir of my nervous depression and sense of maladjustment, in

spite of my interest in the fascinating lectures given there by

Lanciani of Rome, and a definite course of reading under the

guidance of a Johns Hopkins lecturer upon the United Italy

movement. In the latter I naturally encountered the influence of

Mazzini, which was a source of great comfort to me, although

perhaps I went too suddenly from a contemplation of his wonderful

ethical and philosophical appeal to the workingmen of Italy,

directly to the lecture rooms at Johns Hopkins University, for I

was certainly much disillusioned at this time as to the effect of

intellectual pursuits upon moral development.

The summers were spent in the old home in northern Illinois, and

one Sunday morning I received the rite of baptism and became a

member of the Presbyterian church in the village. At this time

there was certainly no outside pressure pushing me towards such a

decision, and at twenty-five one does not ordinarily take such a

step from a mere desire to conform. While I was not conscious of

any emotional "conversion," I took upon myself the outward

expressions of the religious life with all humility and

sincerity. It was doubtless true that I was

"Weary of myself and sick of asking

What I am and what I ought to be,"

and that various cherished safeguards and claims to

self-dependence had been broken into by many piteous failures.

But certainly I had been brought to the conclusion that

"sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope of being good in

one's own right is the only door to the Universe's deeper

reaches." Perhaps the young clergyman recognized this as the test

of the Christian temper, at any rate he required little assent to

dogma or miracle, and assured me that while both the ministry and

the officers of his church were obliged to subscribe to doctrines

of well-known severity, the faith required to the laity was

almost early Christian in its simplicity. I was conscious of no

change from my childish acceptance of the teachings of the

Gospels, but at this moment something persuasive within made me

long for an outward symbol of fellowship, some bond of peace,

some blessed spot where unity of spirit might claim right of way

over all differences. There was also growing within me an almost

passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy, and when in all

history had these ideals been so thrillingly expressed as when

the faith of the fisherman and the slave had been boldly opposed

to the accepted moral belief that the well-being of a privileged

few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the

many? Who was I, with my dreams of universal fellowship, that I

did not identify myself with the institutional statement of this

belief, as it stood in the little village in which I was born,

and without which testimony in each remote hamlet of Christendom

it would be so easy for the world to slip back into the doctrines

of selection and aristocracy?

In one of the intervening summers between these European journeys

I visited a western state where I had formerly invested a sum of

money in mortgages. I was much horrified by the wretched

conditions among the farmers, which had resulted from a long

period of drought, and one forlorn picture was fairly burned into

my mind. A number of starved hogs--collateral for a promissory

note--were huddled into an open pen. Their backs were humped in a

curious, camel-like fashion, and they were devouring one of their

own number, the latest victim of absolute starvation or possibly

merely the one least able to defend himself against their

voracious hunger. The farmer's wife looked on indifferently, a

picture of despair as she stood in the door of the bare, crude

house, and the two children behind her, whom she vainly tried to

keep out of sight, continually thrust forward their faces almost

covered by masses of coarse, sunburned hair, and their little bare

feet so black, so hard, the great cracks so filled with dust that

they looked like flattened hoofs. The children could not be

compared to anything so joyous as satyrs, although they appeared

but half-human. It seemed to me quite impossible to receive

interest from mortgages placed upon farms which might at any

season be reduced to such conditions, and with great inconvenience

to my agent and doubtless with hardship to the farmers, as

speedily as possible I withdrew all my investment. But something

had to be done with the money, and in my reaction against unseen

horrors I bought a farm near my native village and also a flock of

innocent-looking sheep. My partner in the enterprise had not

chosen the shepherd's lot as a permanent occupation, but hoped to

speedily finish his college course upon half the proceeds of our

venture. This pastoral enterprise still seems to me to have been

essentially sound, both economically and morally, but perhaps one

partner depended too much upon the impeccability of her motives

and the other found himself too preoccupied with study to know

that it is not a real kindness to bed a sheepfold with straw, for

certainly the venture ended in a spectacle scarcely less harrowing

than the memory it was designed to obliterate. At least the sight

of two hundred sheep with four rotting hoofs each, was not

reassuring to one whose conscience craved economic peace. A

fortunate series of sales of mutton, wool, and farm enabled the

partners to end the enterprise without loss, and they passed on,

one to college and the other to Europe, if not wiser, certainly

sadder for the experience.

It was during this second journey to Europe that I attended a

meeting of the London match girls who were on strike and who met

daily under the leadership of well-known labor men of London. The

low wages that were reported at the meetings, the phossy jaw

which was described and occasionally exhibited, the appearance of

the girls themselves I did not, curiously enough, in any wise

connect with what was called the labor movement, nor did I

understand the efforts of the London trades-unionists, concerning

whom I held the vaguest notions. But of course this impression

of human misery was added to the others which were already making

me so wretched. I think that up to this time I was still filled

with the sense which Wells describes in one of his young

characters, that somewhere in Church or State are a body of

authoritative people who will put things to rights as soon as

they really know what is wrong. Such a young person persistently

believes that behind all suffering, behind sin and want, must lie

redeeming magnanimity. He may imagine the world to be tragic and

terrible, but it never for an instant occurs to him that it may

be contemptible or squalid or self-seeking. Apparently I looked

upon the efforts of the trades-unionists as I did upon those of

Frederic Harrison and the Positivists whom I heard the next

Sunday in Newton Hall, as a manifestation of "loyalty to

humanity" and an attempt to aid in its progress. I was

enormously interested in the Positivists during these European

years; I imagined that their philosophical conception of man's

religious development might include all expressions of that for

which so many ages of men have struggled and aspired. I vaguely

hoped for this universal comity when I stood in Stonehenge, on

the Acropolis in Athens, or in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

But never did I so desire it as in the cathedrals of Winchester,

Notre Dame, Amiens. One winter's day I traveled from Munich to

Ulm because I imagined from what the art books said that the

cathedral hoarded a medieval statement of the Positivists' final

synthesis, prefiguring their conception of a "Supreme Humanity."

In this I was not altogether disappointed. The religious history

carved on the choir stalls at Ulm contained Greek philosophers as

well as Hebrew prophets, and among the disciples and saints stood

the discoverer of music and a builder of pagan temples. Even then

I was startled, forgetting for the moment the religious revolutions

of south Germany, to catch sight of a window showing Luther as

he affixed his thesis on the door at Wittenberg, the picture

shining clear in the midst of the older glass of saint and symbol.

My smug notebook states that all this was an admission that "the

saints but embodied fine action," and it proceeds at some length

to set forth my hope for a "cathedral of humanity," which should

be "capacious enough to house a fellowship of common purpose,"

and which should be "beautiful enough to persuade men to hold

fast to the vision of human solidarity." It is quite impossible

for me to reproduce this experience at Ulm unless I quote pages

more from the notebook in which I seem to have written half the

night, in a fever of composition cast in ill-digested phrases

from Comte. It doubtless reflected also something of the faith

of the Old Catholics, a charming group of whom I had recently met

in Stuttgart, and the same mood is easily traced in my early

hopes for the Settlement that it should unite in the fellowship

of the deed those of widely differing religious beliefs.

The beginning of 1887 found our little party of three in very

picturesque lodgings in Rome, and settled into a certain

student's routine. But my study of the Catacombs was brought to

an abrupt end in a fortnight by a severe attack of sciatic

rheumatism, which kept me in Rome with a trained nurse during

many weeks, and later sent me to the Riviera to lead an invalid's

life once more. Although my Catacomb lore thus remained

hopelessly superficial, it seemed to me a sufficient basis for a

course of six lectures which I timidly offered to a Deaconess's

Training School during my first winter in Chicago, upon the

simple ground that this early interpretation of Christianity is

the one which should be presented to the poor, urging that the

primitive church was composed of the poor and that it was they

who took the wonderful news to the more prosperous Romans. The

open-minded head of the school gladly accepted the lectures,

arranging that the course should be given each spring to her

graduating class of Home and Foreign Missionaries, and at the end

of the third year she invited me to become one of the trustees of

the school. I accepted and attended one meeting of the board,

but never another, because some of the older members objected to

my membership on the ground that "no religious instruction was

given at Hull-House." I remember my sympathy for the

embarrassment in which the head of the school was placed, but if

I needed comfort, a bit of it came to me on my way home from the

trustees' meeting when an Italian laborer paid my street-car

fare, according to the custom of our simpler neighbors. Upon my

inquiry of the conductor as to whom I was indebted for the little

courtesy, he replied roughly enough, "I cannot tell one dago from

another when they are in a gang, but sure, any one of them would

do it for you as quick as they would for the Sisters."

It is hard to tell just when the very simple plan which afterward

developed into the Settlement began to form itself in my mind. It

may have been even before I went to Europe for the second time,

but I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to

rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and

actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given

over too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity

along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself; where

they might try out some of the things they had been taught and

put truth to "the ultimate test of the conduct it dictates or

inspires." I do not remember to have mentioned this plan to

anyone until we reached Madrid in April, 1888.

We had been to see a bull fight rendered in the most magnificent

Spanish style, where greatly to my surprise and horror, I found

that I had seen, with comparative indifference, five bulls and

many more horses killed. The sense that this was the last

survival of all the glories of the amphitheater, the illusion

that the riders on the caparisoned horses might have been knights

of a tournament, or the matadore a slightly armed gladiator

facing his martyrdom, and all the rest of the obscure yet vivid

associations of an historic survival, had carried me beyond the

endurance of any of the rest of the party. I finally met them in

the foyer, stern and pale with disapproval of my brutal

endurance, and but partially recovered from the faintness and

disgust which the spectacle itself had produced upon them. I had

no defense to offer to their reproaches save that I had not

thought much about the bloodshed; but in the evening the natural

and inevitable reaction came, and in deep chagrin I felt myself

tried and condemned, not only by this disgusting experience but

by the entire moral situation which it revealed. It was suddenly

made quite clear to me that I was lulling my conscience by a

dreamer's scheme, that a mere paper reform had become a defense

for continued idleness, and that I was making it a raison d'etre

for going on indefinitely with study and travel. It is easy to

become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future

can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of

self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in

preparation for great things to come. Nothing less than the

moral reaction following the experience at a bullfight had been

able to reveal to me that so far from following in the wake of a

chariot of philanthropic fire, I had been tied to the tail of the

veriest ox-cart of self-seeking.

I had made up my mind that next day, whatever happened, I would

begin to carry out the plan, if only by talking about it. I can

well recall the stumbling and uncertainty with which I finally

set it forth to Miss Starr, my old-time school friend, who was

one of our party. I even dared to hope that she might join in

carrying out the plan, but nevertheless I told it in the fear of

that disheartening experience which is so apt to afflict our most

cherished plans when they are at last divulged, when we suddenly

feel that there is nothing there to talk about, and as the golden

dream slips through our fingers we are left to wonder at our own

fatuous belief. But gradually the comfort of Miss Starr's

companionship, the vigor and enthusiasm which she brought to bear

upon it, told both in the growth of the plan and upon the sense

of its validity, so that by the time we had reached the

enchantment of the Alhambra, the scheme had become convincing and

tangible although still most hazy in detail.

A month later we parted in Paris, Miss Starr to go back to Italy,

and I to journey on to London to secure as many suggestions as

possible from those wonderful places of which we had heard,

Toynbee Hall and the People's Palace. So that it finally came

about that in June, 1888, five years after my first visit in East

London, I found myself at Toynbee Hall equipped not only with a

letter of introduction from Canon Fremantle, but with high

expectations and a certain belief that whatever perplexities and

discouragement concerning the life of the poor were in store for

me, I should at least know something at first hand and have the

solace of daily activity. I had confidence that although life

itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere

passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last

finished with the ever-lasting "preparation for life," however

ill-prepared I might be.

It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy's phrase

"the snare of preparation," which he insists we spread before the

feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious

inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to

construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Judi Oswalt.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter V: First Days at Hull-House." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.

89-112.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER V

FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE

The next January found Miss Starr and myself in Chicago,

searching for a neighborhood in which we might put our plans into

execution. In our eagerness to win friends for the new

undertaking, we utilized every opportunity to set forth the

meaning of the Settlement as it had been embodied at Toynbee

Hall, although in those days we made no appeal for money, meaning

to start with our own slender resources. From the very first the

plan received courteous attention, and the discussion, while

often skeptical, was always friendly. Professor Swing wrote a

commendatory column in the Evening Journal, and our early

speeches were reported quite out of proportion to their worth. I

recall a spirited evening at the home of Mrs. Wilmarth, which was

attended by that renowned scholar, Thomas Davidson, and by a

young Englishman who was a member of the then new Fabian society

and to whom a peculiar glamour was attached because he had

scoured knives all summer in a camp of high-minded philosophers

in the Adirondacks. Our new little plan met with criticism, not

to say disapproval, from Mr. Davidson, who, as nearly as I can

remember, called it "one of those unnatural attempts to

understand life through cooperative living."

It was in vain we asserted that the collective living was not an

essential part of the plan, that we would always scrupulously pay

our own expenses, and that at any moment we might decide to

scatter through the neighborhood and to live in separate

tenements; he still contended that the fascination for most of

those volunteering residence would lie in the collective living

aspect of the Settlement. His contention was, of course,

essentially sound; there is a constant tendency for the residents

to "lose themselves in the cave of their own companionship," as

the Toynbee Hall phrase goes, but on the other hand, it is

doubtless true that the very companionship, the give and take of

colleagues, is what tends to keep the Settlement normal and in

touch with "the world of things as they are." I am happy to say

that we never resented this nor any other difference of opinion,

and that fifteen years later Professor Davidson handsomely

acknowledged that the advantages of a group far outweighed the

weaknesses he had early pointed out. He was at that later moment

sharing with a group of young men, on the East Side of New York,

his ripest conclusions in philosophy and was much touched by

their intelligent interest and absorbed devotion. I think that

time has also justified our early contention that the mere

foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space,

hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the

large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in

American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for

Chicago. I am not so sure that we succeeded in our endeavors "to

make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic

unity of society and to add the social function to democracy".

But Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the

dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as

the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it

gives a form of expression that has peculiar value.

In our search for a vicinity in which to settle we went about

with the officers of the compulsory education department, with

city missionaries, and with the newspaper reporters whom I recall

as a much older set of men than one ordinarily associates with

that profession, or perhaps I was only sent out with the older

ones on what they must all have considered a quixotic mission.

One Sunday afternoon in the late winter a reporter took me to

visit a so-called anarchist sunday school, several of which were

to be found on the northwest side of the city. The young man in

charge was of the German student type, and his face flushed with

enthusiasm as he led the children singing one of Koerner's poems.

The newspaperman, who did not understand German, asked me what

abominable stuff they were singing, but he seemed dissatisfied

with my translation of the simple words and darkly intimated that

they were "deep ones," and had probably "fooled" me. When I

replied that Koerner was an ardent German poet whose songs

inspired his countrymen to resist the aggressions of Napoleon,

and that his bound poems were found in the most respectable

libraries, he looked at me rather askance and I then and there

had my first intimation that to treat a Chicago man, who is

called an anarchist, as you would treat any other citizen, is to

lay yourself open to deep suspicion.

Another Sunday afternoon in the early spring, on the way to a

Bohemian mission in the carriage of one of its founders, we

passed a fine old house standing well back from the street,

surrounded on three sides by a broad piazza, which was supported

by wooden pillars of exceptionally pure Corinthian design and

proportion. I was so attracted by the house that I set forth to

visit it the very next day, but though I searched for it then and

for several days after, I could not find it, and at length I most

reluctantly gave up the search.

Three weeks later, with the advice of several of the oldest

residents of Chicago, including the ex-mayor of the city, Colonel

Mason, who had from the first been a warm friend to our plans, we

decided upon a location somewhere near the junction of Blue

Island Avenue, Halsted Street, and Harrison Street. I was

surprised and overjoyed on the very first day of our search for

quarters to come upon the hospitable old house, the quest for

which I had so recently abandoned. The house was of course

rented, the lower part of it used for offices and storerooms in

connection with a factory that stood back of it. However, after

some difficulties were overcome, it proved to be possible to

sublet the second floor and what had been a large drawing-room on

the first floor.

The house had passed through many changes since it had been built

in 1856 for the homestead of one of Chicago's pioneer citizens,

Mr. Charles J. Hull, and although battered by its vicissitudes,

was essentially sound. Before it had been occupied by the

factory, it had sheltered a second-hand furniture store, and at

one time the Little Sisters of the Poor had used it for a home

for the aged. It had a half-skeptical reputation for a haunted

attic, so far respected by the tenants living on the second floor

that they always kept a large pitcher full of water on the attic

stairs. Their explanation of this custom was so incoherent that

I was sure it was a survival of the belief that a ghost could not

cross running water, but perhaps that interpretation was only my

eagerness for finding folklore.

The fine old house responded kindly to repairs, its wide hall and

open fireplace always insuring it a gracious aspect. Its

generous owner, Miss Helen Culver, in the following spring gave

us a free leasehold of the entire house. Her kindness has

continued through the years until the group of thirteen

buildings, which at present comprises our equipment, is built

largely upon land which Miss Culver has put at the service of the

Settlement which bears Mr. Hull's name. In those days the house

stood between an undertaking establishment and a saloon. "Knight,

Death and the Devil," the three were called by a Chicago wit, and

yet any mock heroics which might be implied by comparing the

Settlement to a knight quickly dropped away under the genuine

kindness and hearty welcome extended to us by the families living

up and down the street.

We furnished the house as we would have furnished it were it in

another part of the city, with the photographs and other

impedimenta we had collected in Europe, and with a few bits of

family mahogany. While all the new furniture which was bought

was enduring in quality, we were careful to keep it in character

with the fine old residence. Probably no young matron ever placed

her own things in her own house with more pleasure than that with

which we first furnished Hull-House. We believed that the

Settlement may logically bring to its aid all those adjuncts

which the cultivated man regards as good and suggestive of the

best of the life of the past.

On the 18th of September, 1889, Miss Starr and I moved into it,

with Miss Mary Keyser, who began performing the housework, but who

quickly developed into a very important factor in the life of the

vicinity as well as that of the household, and whose death five

years later was most sincerely mourned by hundreds of our neighbors.

In our enthusiasm over "settling," the first night we forgot not

only to lock but to close a side door opening on Polk Street, and

we were much pleased in the morning to find that we possessed a

fine illustration of the honesty and kindliness of our new neighbors.

Our first guest was an interesting young woman who lived in a

neighboring tenement, whose widowed mother aided her in the

support of the family by scrubbing a downtown theater every

night. The mother, of English birth, was well bred and carefully

educated, but was in the midst of that bitter struggle which

awaits so many strangers in American cities who find that their

social position tends to be measured solely by the standards of

living they are able to maintain. Our guest has long since

married the struggling young lawyer to whom she was then engaged,

and he is now leading his profession in an eastern city. She

recalls that month's experience always with a sense of amusement

over the fact that the succession of visitors who came to see the

new Settlement invariably questioned her most minutely concerning

"these people" without once suspecting that they were talking to

one who had been identified with the neighborhood from childhood.

I at least was able to draw a lesson from the incident, and I

never addressed a Chicago audience on the subject of the

Settlement and its vicinity without inviting a neighbor to go

with me, that I might curb any hasty generalization by the

consciousness that I had an auditor who knew the conditions more

intimately than I could hope to do.

Halsted Street has grown so familiar during twenty years of

residence that it is difficult to recall its gradual changes,--the

withdrawal of the more prosperous Irish and Germans, and the slow

substitution of Russian Jews, Italians, and Greeks. A description

of the street such as I gave in those early addresses still stands

in my mind as sympathetic and correct.

Halsted Street is thirty-two miles long, and one of the

great thoroughfares of Chicago; Polk Street crosses it

midway between the stockyards to the south and the

shipbuilding yards on the north branch of the Chicago

River. For the six miles between these two industries the

street is lined with shops of butchers and grocers, with

dingy and gorgeous saloons, and pretentious establishments

for the sale of ready-made clothing. Polk Street, running

west from Halsted Street, grows rapidly more prosperous;

running a mile east to State Street, it grows steadily

worse, and crosses a network of vice on the corners of

Clark Street and Fifth Avenue. Hull-House once stood in

the suburbs, but the city has steadily grown up around it

and its site now has corners on three or four foreign

colonies. Between Halsted Street and the river live about

ten thousand Italians--Neapolitans, Sicilians, and

Calabrians, with an occasional Lombard or Venetian. To

the south on Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side

streets are given over almost entirely to Polish and

Russian Jews. Still farther south, these Jewish colonies

merge into a huge Bohemian colony, so vast that Chicago

ranks as the third Bohemian city in the world. To the

northwest are many Canadian-French, clannish in spite of

their long residence in America, and to the north are

Irish and first-generation Americans. On the streets

directly west and farther north are well-to-do English

speaking families, many of whom own their own houses and

have lived in the neighborhood for years; one man is still

living in his old farmhouse.

The policy of the public authorities of never taking an

initiative, and always waiting to be urged to do their

duty, is obviously fatal in a neighborhood where there is

little initiative among the citizens. The idea underlying

our self- government breaks down in such a ward. The

streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools

inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street

lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking

in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul

beyond description. Hundreds of houses are unconnected

with the street sewer. The older and richer inhabitants

seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they can afford

it. They make room for newly arrived immigrants who are

densely ignorant of civic duties. This substitution of

the older inhabitants is accomplished industrially also,

in the south and east quarters of the ward. The Jews and

Italians do the finishing for the great clothing

manufacturers, formerly done by Americans, Irish, and

Germans, who refused to submit to the extremely low prices

to which the sweating system has reduced their successors.

As the design of the sweating system is the elimination of

rent from the manufacture of clothing, the "outside work"

is begun after the clothing leaves the cutter. An

unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark,

no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional,

no tenement room too small for his workroom, as these

conditions imply low rental. Hence these shops abound in

the worst of the foreign districts where the sweater

easily finds his cheap basement and his home finishers.

The houses of the ward, for the most part wooden, were

originally built for one family and are now occupied by

several. They are after the type of the inconvenient

frame cottages found in the poorer suburbs twenty years

ago. Many of them were built where they now stand; others

were brought thither on rollers, because their previous

sites had been taken by factories. The fewer brick

tenement buildings which are three or four stories high

are comparatively new, and there are few large tenements.

The little wooden houses have a temporary aspect, and for

this reason, perhaps, the tenement-house legislation in

Chicago is totally inadequate. Rear tenements flourish;

many houses have no water supply save the faucet in the

back yard, there are no fire escapes, the garbage and

ashes are placed in wooden boxes which are fastened to the

street pavements. One of the most discouraging features

about the present system of tenement houses is that many

are owned by sordid and ignorant immigrants. The theory

that wealth brings responsibility, that possession entails

at length education and refinement, in these cases fails

utterly. The children of an Italian immigrant owner may

"shine" shoes in the street, and his wife may pick rags

from the street gutter, laboriously sorting them in a

dingy court. Wealth may do something for her

self-complacency and feeling of consequence; it certainly

does nothing for her comfort or her children's improvement

nor for the cleanliness of anyone concerned. Another

thing that prevents better houses in Chicago is the

tentative attitude of the real estate men. Many unsavory

conditions are allowed to continue which would be regarded

with horror if they were considered permanent. Meanwhile,

the wretched conditions persist until at least two

generations of children have been born and reared in them.

In every neighborhood where poorer people live, because

rents are supposed to be cheaper there, is an element

which, although uncertain in the individual, in the

aggregate can be counted upon. It is composed of people

of former education and opportunity who have cherished

ambitions and prospects, but who are caricatures of what

they meant to be--"hollow ghosts which blame the living

men." There are times in many lives when there is a

cessation of energy and loss of power. Men and women of

education and refinement come to live in a cheaper

neighborhood because they lack the ability to make money,

because of ill health, because of an unfortunate marriage,

or for other reasons which do not imply criminality or

stupidity. Among them are those who, in spite of untoward

circumstances, keep up some sort of an intellectual life;

those who are "great for books," as their neighbors say.

To such the Settlement may be a genuine refuge.

In the very first weeks of our residence Miss Starr started a

reading party in George Eliot's "Romola," which was attended by a

group of young women who followed the wonderful tale with

unflagging interest. The weekly reading was held in our little

upstairs dining room, and two members of the club came to dinner

each week, not only that they might be received as guests, but

that they might help us wash the dishes afterwards and so make

the table ready for the stacks of Florentine photographs.

Our "first resident," as she gaily designated herself, was a

charming old lady who gave five consecutive readings from

Hawthorne to a most appreciative audience, interspersing the

magic tales most delightfully with recollections of the elusive

and fascinating author. Years before she had lived at Brook Farm

as a pupil of the Ripleys, and she came to us for ten days

because she wished to live once more in an atmosphere where

"idealism ran high." We thus early found the type of class which

through all the years has remained most popular--a combination of

a social atmosphere with serious study.

Volunteers to the new undertaking came quickly; a charming young

girl conducted a kindergarten in the drawing room, coming

regularly every morning from her home in a distant part of the

North Side of the city. Although a tablet to her memory has

stood upon a mantel shelf in Hull-House for five years, we still

associate her most vividly with the play of little children,

first in her kindergarten and then in her own nursery, which

furnished a veritable illustration of Victor Hugo's definition of

heaven--"a place where parents are always young and children

always little." Her daily presence for the first two years made

it quite impossible for us to become too solemn and

self-conscious in our strenuous routine, for her mirth and

buoyancy were irresistible and her eager desire to share the life

of the neighborhood never failed, although it was often put to a

severe test. One day at luncheon she gaily recited her futile

attempt to impress temperance principles upon the mind of an

Italian mother, to whom she had returned a small daughter of five

sent to the kindergarten "in quite a horrid state of

intoxication" from the wine-soaked bread upon which she had

breakfasted. The mother, with the gentle courtesy of a South

Italian, listened politely to her graphic portrayal of the

untimely end awaiting so immature a wine bibber; but long before

the lecture was finished, quite unconscious of the incongruity,

she hospitably set forth her best wines, and when her baffled

guest refused one after the other, she disappeared, only to

quickly return with a small dark glass of whisky, saying

reassuringly, "See, I have brought you the true American drink."

The recital ended in seriocomic despair, with the rueful

statement that "the impression I probably made on her darkened

mind was, that it was the American custom to breakfast children

on bread soaked in whisky instead of light Italian wine."

That first kindergarten was a constant source of education to us.

We were much surprised to find social distinctions even among its

lambs, although greatly amused with the neat formulation made by

the superior little Italian boy who refused to sit beside uncouth

little Angelina because "we eat our macaroni this way"--imitating

the movement of a fork from a plate to his mouth--"and she eat

her macaroni this way," holding his hand high in the air and

throwing back his head, that his wide-open mouth might receive an

imaginary cascade. Angelina gravely nodded her little head in

approval of this distinction between gentry and peasant. "But

isn't it astonishing that merely table manners are made such a

test all the way along--" was the comment of their democratic

teacher. Another memory which refuses to be associated with

death, which came to her all too soon, is that of the young girl

who organized our first really successful club of boys, holding

their fascinated interest by the old chivalric tales, set forth

so dramatically and vividly that checkers and jackstraws were

abandoned by all the other clubs on Boys' Day, that their members

might form a listening fringe to "The Young Heros."

I met a member of the latter club one day as he flung himself out

of the House in the rage by which an emotional boy hopes to keep

from shedding tears. "There is no use coming here any more,

Prince Roland is dead," he gruffly explained as we passed. We

encouraged the younger boys in tournaments and dramatics of all

sorts, and we somewhat fatuously believed that boys who were

early interested in adventurers or explorers might later want to

know the lives of living statesmen and inventors. It is needless

to add that the boys quickly responded to such a program, and

that the only difficulty lay in finding leaders who were able to

carry it out. This difficulty has been with us through all the

years of growth and development in the Boys' Club until now, with

its five-story building, its splendid equipment of shops, of

recreation and study rooms, that group alone is successful which

commands the services of a resourceful and devoted leader.

The dozens of younger children who from the first came to Hull-

House were organized into groups which were not quite classes and

not quite clubs. The value of these groups consisted almost

entirely in arousing a higher imagination and in giving the

children the opportunity which they could not have in the crowded

schools, for initiative and for independent social relationships.

The public schools then contained little hand work of any sort,

so that naturally any instruction which we provided for the

children took the direction of this supplementary work. But it

required a constant effort that the pressure of poverty itself

should not defeat the educational aim. The Italian girls in the

sewing classes would count the day lost when they could not carry

home a garment, and the insistence that it should be neatly made

seemed a super-refinement to those in dire need of clothing.

As these clubs have been continued during the twenty years they

have developed classes in the many forms of handicraft which the

newer education is so rapidly adapting for the delight of

children; but they still keep their essentially social character

and still minister to that large number of children who leave

school the very week they are fourteen years old, only too eager

to close the schoolroom door forever on a tiresome task that is

at last well over. It seems to us important that these children

shall find themselves permanently attached to a House that offers

them evening clubs and classes with their old companions, that

merges as easily as possible the school life into the working

life and does what it can to find places for the bewildered young

things looking for work. A large proportion of the delinquent

boys brought into the juvenile court in Chicago are the oldest

sons in large families whose wages are needed at home. The

grades from which many of them leave school, as the records show,

are piteously far from the seventh and eighth where the very

first introduction in manual training is given, nor have they

been caught by any other abiding interest.

In spite of these flourishing clubs for children early

established at Hull-House, and the fact that our first organized

undertaking was a kindergarten, we were very insistent that the

Settlement should not be primarily for the children, and that it

was absurd to suppose that grown people would not respond to

opportunities for education and social life. Our enthusiastic

kindergartner herself demonstrated this with an old woman of

ninety who, because she was left alone all day while her daughter

cooked in a restaurant, had formed such a persistent habit of

picking the plaster off the walls that one landlord after another

refused to have her for a tenant. It required but a few week's

time to teach her to make large paper chains, and gradually she

was content to do it all day long, and in the end took quite as

much pleasure in adorning the walls as she had formally taken in

demolishing them. Fortunately the landlord had never heard the

aesthetic principle that exposure of basic construction is more

desirable than gaudy decoration. In course of time it was

discovered that the old woman could speak Gaelic, and when one or

two grave professors came to see her, the neighborhood was filled

with pride that such a wonder lived in their midst. To mitigate

life for a woman of ninety was an unfailing refutation of the

statement that the Settlement was designed for the young.

On our first New Year's Day at Hull-House we invited the older

people in the vicinity, sending a carriage for the most feeble

and announcing to all of them that we were going to organize an

Old Settlers' Party.

Every New Year's Day since, older people in varying numbers have

come together at Hull-House to relate early hardships, and to take

for the moment the place in the community to which their pioneer

life entitles them. Many people who were formerly residents of

the vicinity, but whom prosperity has carried into more desirable

neighborhoods, come back to these meetings and often confess to

each other that they have never since found such kindness as in

early Chicago when all its citizens came together in mutual

enterprises. Many of these pioneers, so like the men and women of

my earliest childhood that I always felt comforted by their

presence in the house, were very much opposed to "foreigners,"

whom they held responsible for a depreciation of property and a

general lowering of the tone of the neighborhood. Sometimes we had

a chance for championship; I recall one old man, fiercely

American, who had reproached me because we had so many "foreign

views" on our walls, to whom I endeavored to set forth our hope

that the pictures might afford a familiar island to the immigrants

in a sea of new and strange impressions. The old settler guest,

taken off his guard, replied, "I see; they feel as we did when we

saw a Yankee notion from Down East,"--thereby formulating the dim

kinship between the pioneer and the immigrant, both "buffeting the

waves of a new development." The older settlers as well as their

children throughout the years have given genuine help to our

various enterprises for neighborhood improvement, and from their

own memories of earlier hardships have made many shrewd

suggestions for alleviating the difficulties of that first sharp

struggle with untoward conditions.

In those early days we were often asked why we had come to live

on Halsted Street when we could afford to live somewhere else. I

remember one man who used to shake his head and say it was "the

strangest thing he had met in his experience," but who was

finally convinced that it was "not strange but natural." In time

it came to seem natural to all of us that the Settlement should

be there. If it is natural to feed the hungry and care for the

sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young,

comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving

for social intercourse that all men feel. Whoever does it is

rewarded by something which, if not gratitude, is at least

spontaneous and vital and lacks that irksome sense of obligation

with which a substantial benefit is too often acknowledged.

In addition to the neighbors who responded to the receptions and

classes, we found those who were too battered and oppressed to

care for them. To these, however, was left that susceptibility

to the bare offices of humanity which raises such offices into a

bond of fellowship.

From the first it seemed understood that we were ready to perform

the humblest neighborhood services. We were asked to wash the

new-born babies, and to prepare the dead for burial, to nurse the

sick, and to "mind the children."

Occasionally these neighborly offices unexpectedly uncovered ugly

human traits. For six weeks after an operation we kept in one of

our three bedrooms a forlorn little baby who, because he was born

with a cleft palate, was most unwelcome even to his mother, and

we were horrified when he died of neglect a week after he was

returned to his home; a little Italian bride of fifteen sought

shelter with us one November evening to escape her husband who

had beaten her every night for a week when he returned home from

work, because she had lost her wedding ring; two of us officiated

quite alone at the birth of an illegitimate child because the

doctor was late in arriving, and none of the honest Irish matrons

would "touch the likes of her"; we ministered at the deathbed of

a young man, who during a long illness of tuberculosis had

received so many bottles of whisky through the mistaken kindness

of his friends, that the cumulative effect produced wild periods

of exultation, in one of which he died.

We were also early impressed with the curious isolation of many

of the immigrants; an Italian woman once expressed her pleasure

in the red roses that she saw at one of our receptions in

surprise that they had been "brought so fresh all the way from

Italy." She would not believe for an instant that they had been

grown in America. She said that she had lived in Chicago for six

years and had never seen any roses, whereas in Italy she had seen

them every summer in great profusion. During all that time, of

course, the woman had lived within ten blocks of a florist's

window; she had not been more than a five-cent car ride away from

the public parks; but she had never dreamed of faring forth for

herself, and no one had taken her. Her conception of America had

been the untidy street in which she lived and had made her long

struggle to adapt herself to American ways.

But in spite of some untoward experiences, we were constantly

impressed with the uniform kindness and courtesy we received.

Perhaps these first days laid the simple human foundations which

are certainly essential for continuous living among the poor;

first, genuine preference for residence in an industrial quarter

to any other part of the city, because it is interesting and

makes the human appeal; and second, the conviction, in the words

of Canon Barnett, that the things that make men alike are finer

and better than the things that keep them apart, and that these

basic likenesses, if they are properly accentuated, easily

transcend the less essential differences of race, language,

creed, and tradition.

Perhaps even in those first days we made a beginning toward that

object which was afterwards stated in our charter: "To provide a

center for higher civic and social life; to institute and

maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to

investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial

districts of Chicago."

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Diana Camden.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter VI: The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements." by

Jane Addams (1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 113-127.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER VI

SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS

The Ethical Culture Societies held a summer school at Plymouth,

Massachusetts, in 1892, to which they invited several people

representing the then new Settlement movement, that they might

discuss with others the general theme of Philanthropy and Social

Progress.

I venture to produce here parts of a lecture I delivered in

Plymouth, both because I have found it impossible to formulate

with the same freshness those early motives and strivings, and

because, when published with other papers given that summer, it

was received by the Settlement people themselves as a

satisfactory statement.

I remember on golden summer afternoon during the sessions of the

summer school that several of us met on the shores of a pond in a

pine wood a few miles from Plymouth, to discuss our new movement.

The natural leader of the group was Robert A. Woods. He had

recently returned from a residence in Toynbee Hall, London, to

open Andover House in Boston, and had just issued a book, "English

Social Movements," in which he had gathered together and focused

the many forms of social endeavor preceding and contemporaneous

with the English Settlements. There were Miss Vida D. Scudder and

Miss Helena Dudley from the College Settlement Association, Miss

Julia C. Lathrop and myself from Hull-House. Some of us had

numbered our years as far as thirty, and we all carefully avoided

the extravagance of statement which characterizes youth, and yet I

doubt if anywhere on the continent that summer could have been

found a group of people more genuinely interested in social

development or more sincerely convinced that they had found a clue

by which the conditions in crowded cities might be understood and

the agencies for social betterment developed.

We were all careful to avoid saying that we had found a "life

work," perhaps with an instinctive dread of expending all our

energy in vows of constancy, as so often happens; and yet it is

interesting to note that of all the people whom I have recalled as

the enthusiasts at that little conference have remained attached to

Settlements in actual residence for longer or shorter periods each

year during the eighteen years that have elapsed since then,

although they have also been closely identified as publicists or

governmental officials with movements outside. It is as if they

had discovered that the Settlement was too valuable as a method as

a way of approach to the social question to abandoned, although

they had long since discovered it was not a "social movement" in

itself. This, however, is anticipating the future, whereas the

following paper on "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements"

should have a chance to speak for itself. It is perhaps too

late in the day to express regret for its stilted title.

This paper is an attempt to analyze the motives which underlie a

movement based, not only upon conviction, but upon genuine

emotion, wherever educated young people are seeking an outlet for

that sentiment for universal brotherhood, which the best spirit of

our times is forcing from an emotion into a motive. These young

people accomplish little toward the solution of this social

problem, and bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished,

oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the common

labor by which they live which is a great source of moral and

physical health. They feel a fatal want of harmony between their

theory and their lives, a lack of coordination between thought and

action. I think it is hard for us to realize how seriously many

of them are taking to the notion of human brotherhood, how eagerly

they long to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal.

These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy,

are animated by certain hopes which may be thus loosely

formulated; that if in a democratic country nothing can be

permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it

will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the

people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the

notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common

intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of

refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made

universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for

ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air,

until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common

life. It is easier to state these hopes than to formulate the

line of motives, which I believe to constitute the trend of the

subjective pressure toward the Settlement. There is something

primordial about these motives, but I am perhaps overbold in

designating them as a great desire to share the race life. We all

bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up

the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and

glimpses of that long life of our ancestors, which still goes on

among so many of our contemporaries. Nothing so deadens the

sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent

keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a

continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the

life of at least half the race. To shut one's self away from that

half of the race life is to shut one's self away from the most

vital part of it; it is to live out but half the humanity to which

we have been born heir and to use but half our faculties. We have

all had longings for a fuller life which should include the use of

these faculties. These longings are the physical complement of

the "Intimations of Immortality," on which no ode has yet been

written. To portray these would be the work of a poet, and it is

hazardous for any but a poet to attempt it.

You may remember the forlorn feeling which occasionally seizes

you when you arrive early in the morning a stranger in a great

city: the stream of laboring people goes past you as you gaze

through the plate-glass window of your hotel; you see hard

working men lifting great burdens; you hear the driving and

jostling of huge carts and your heart sinks with a sudden sense

of futility. The door opens behind you and you turn to the man

who brings you in your breakfast with a quick sense of human

fellowship. You find yourself praying that you may never lose

your hold on it all. A more poetic prayer would be that the

great mother breasts of our common humanity, with its labor and

suffering and its homely comforts, may never be withheld from

you. You turn helplessly to the waiter and feel that it would be

almost grotesque to claim from him the sympathy you crave because

civilization has placed you apart, but you resent your position

with a sudden sense of snobbery. Literature is full of

portrayals of these glimpses: they come to shipwrecked men on

rafts; they overcome the differences of an incongruous multitude

when in the presence of a great danger or when moved by a common

enthusiasm. They are not, however, confined to such moments, and

if we were in the habit of telling them to each other, the

recital would be as long as the tales of children are, when they

sit down on the green grass and confide to each other how many

times they have remembered that they lived once before. If these

childish tales are the stirring of inherited impressions, just so

surely is the other the striving of inherited powers.

"It is true that there is nothing after disease, indigence and a

sense of guilt, so fatal to health and to life itself as the want

of a proper outlet for active faculties." I have seen young girls

suffer and grow sensibly lowered in vitality in the first years

after they leave school. In our attempt then to give a girl

pleasure and freedom from care we succeed, for the most part, in

making her pitifully miserable. She finds "life" so different

from what she expected it to be. She is besotted with innocent

little ambitions, and does not understand this apparent waste of

herself, this elaborate preparation, if no work is provided for

her. There is a heritage of noble obligation which young people

accept and long to perpetuate. The desire for action, the wish

to right wrong and alleviate suffering haunts them daily. Society

smiles at it indulgently instead of making it of value to itself.

The wrong to them begins even farther back, when we restrain the

first childish desires for "doing good", and tell them that they

must wait until they are older and better fitted. We intimate

that social obligation begins at a fixed date, forgetting that it

begins at birth itself. We treat them as children who, with

strong-growing limbs, are allowed to use their legs but not their

arms, or whose legs are daily carefully exercised that after a

while their arms may be put to high use. We do this in spite of

the protest of the best educators, Locke and Pestalozzi. We are

fortunate in the meantime if their unused members do not weaken

and disappear. They do sometimes. There are a few girls who, by

the time they are "educated", forget their old childish desires

to help the world and to play with poor little girls "who haven't

playthings". Parents are often inconsistent: they deliberately

expose their daughters to knowledge of the distress in the world;

they send them to hear missionary addresses on famines in India

and China; they accompany them to lectures on the suffering in

Siberia; they agitate together over the forgotten region of East

London. In addition to this, from babyhood the altruistic

tendencies of these daughters are persistently cultivated. They

are taught to be self-forgetting and self-sacrificing, to

consider the good of the whole before the good of the ego. But

when all this information and culture show results, when the

daughter comes back from college and begins to recognize her

social claim to the "submerged tenth", and to evince a

disposition to fulfill it, the family claim is strenuously

asserted; she is told that she is unjustified, ill-advised in her

efforts. If she persists, the family too often are injured and

unhappy unless the efforts are called missionary and the

religious zeal of the family carry them over their sense of

abuse. When this zeal does not exist, the result is perplexing.

It is a curious violation of what we would fain believe a

fundamental law--that the final return of the deed is upon the

head of the doer. The deed is that of exclusiveness and caution,

but the return, instead of falling upon the head of the exclusive

and cautious, falls upon a young head full of generous and

unselfish plans. The girl loses something vital out of her life

to which she is entitled. She is restricted and unhappy; her

elders meanwhile, are unconscious of the situation and we have

all the elements of a tragedy.

We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young

people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties.

They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way

is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs

about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness

is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that

if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function.

These young people have had advantages of college, of European

travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock

of inaction. They have pet phrases, and they tell you that the

things that make us all alike are stronger than the things that

make us different. They say that all men are united by needs and

sympathies far more permanent and radical than anything that

temporarily divides them and sets them in opposition to each

other. If they affect art, they say that the decay in artistic

expression is due to the decay in ethics, that art when shut away

from the human interests and from the great mass of humanity is

self-destructive. They tell their elders with all the bitterness

of youth that if they expect success from them in business or

politics or in whatever lines their ambition for them has run,

they must let them consult all of humanity; that they must let

them find out what the people want and how they want it. It is

only the stronger young people, however, who formulate this. Many

of them dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment. Others

not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for

their second degrees; not that they are especially fond of study,

but because they want something definite to do, and their powers

have been trained in the direction of mental accumulation. Many

are buried beneath this mental accumulation with lowered vitality

and discontent. Walter Besant says they have had the vision that

Peter had when he saw the great sheet let down from heaven,

wherein was neither clean nor unclean. He calls it the sense of

humanity. It is not philanthropy nor benevolence, but a thing

fuller and wider than either of these.

This young life, so sincere in its emotion and good phrases and

yet so undirected, seems to me as pitiful as the other great mass

of destitute lives. One is supplementary to the other, and some

method of communication can surely be devised. Mr. Barnett, who

urged the first Settlement,--Toynbee Hall, in East

London,--recognized this need of outlet for the young men of

Oxford and Cambridge, and hoped that the Settlement would supply

the communication. It is easy to see why the Settlement movement

originated in England, where the years of education are more

constrained and definite than they are here, where class

distinctions are more rigid. The necessity of it was greater

there, but we are fast feeling the pressure of the need and

meeting the necessity for Settlements in America. Our young

people feel nervously the need of putting theory into action, and

respond quickly to the Settlement form of activity.

Other motives which I believe make toward the Settlement are the

result of a certain renaissance going forward in Christianity.

The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make

social service, irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of

Christ, is as old as Christianity itself. We have no proof from

the records themselves that the early Roman Christians, who

strained their simple art to the point of grotesqueness in their

eagerness to record a "good news" on the walls of the catacombs,

considered this good news a religion. Jesus had no set of truths

labeled Religious. On the contrary, his doctrine was that all

truth is one, that the appropriation of it is freedom. His

teaching had no dogma to mark it off from truth and action in

general. He himself called it a revelation--a life. These early

Roman Christians received the Gospel message, a command to love

all men, with a certain joyous simplicity. The image of the Good

Shepherd is blithe and gay beyond the gentlest shepherd of Greek

mythology; the hart no longer pants, but rushes to the water

brooks. The Christians looked for the continuous revelation, but

believed what Jesus said, that this revelation, to be retained

and made manifest, must be put into terms of action; that action

is the only medium man has for receiving and appropriating truth;

that the doctrine must be known through the will.

That Christianity has to be revealed and embodied in the line of

social progress is a corollary to the simple proposition, that

man's action is found in his social relationships in the way in

which he connects with his fellows; that his motives for action

are the zeal and affection with which he regards his fellows. By

this simple process was created a deep enthusiasm for humanity;

which regarded man as at once the organ and the object of

revelation; and by this process came about the wonderful

fellowship, the true democracy of the early Church, that so

captivates the imagination. The early Christians were

preeminently nonresistant. They believed in love as a cosmic

force. There was no iconoclasm during the minor peace of the

Church. They did not yet denounce nor tear down temples, nor

preach the end of the world. They grew to a mighty number, but

it never occurred to them, either in their weakness or in their

strength, to regard other men for an instant as their foes or as

aliens. The spectacle of the Christians loving all men was the

most astounding Rome had ever seen. They were eager to sacrifice

themselves for the weak, for children, and for the aged; they

identified themselves with slaves and did not avoid the plague;

they longed to share the common lot that they might receive the

constant revelation. It was a new treasure which the early

Christians added to the sum of all treasures, a joy hitherto

unknown in the world--the joy of finding the Christ which lieth

in each man, but which no man can unfold save in fellowship. A

happiness ranging from the heroic to the pastoral enveloped them.

They were to possess a revelation as long as life had new meaning

to unfold, new action to propose.

I believe that there is a distinct turning among many young men

and women toward this simple acceptance of Christ's message. They

resent the assumption that Christianity is a set of ideas which

belong to the religious consciousness, whatever that may be.

They insist that it cannot be proclaimed and instituted apart

from the social life of the community and that it must seek a

simple and natural expression in the social organism itself. The

Settlement movement is only one manifestation of that wider

humanitarian movement which throughout Christendom, but

pre-eminently in England, is endeavoring to embody itself, not in

a sect, but in society itself.

I believe that this turning, this renaissance of the early

Christian humanitarianism, is going on in America, in Chicago, if

you please, without leaders who write or philosophize, without

much speaking, but with a bent to express in social service and in

terms of action the spirit of Christ. Certain it is that

spiritual force is found in the Settlement movement, and it is

also true that this force must be evoked and must be called into

play before the success of any Settlement is assured. There must

be the overmastering belief that all that is noblest in life is

common to men as men, in order to accentuate the likenesses and

ignore the differences which are found among the people whom the

Settlement constantly brings into juxtaposition. It may be true,

as the Positivists insist, that the very religious fervor of man

can be turned into love for his race, and his desire for a future

life into content to live in the echo of his deeds; Paul's formula

of seeking for the Christ which lieth in each man and founding our

likenesses on him, seems a simpler formula to many of us.

In a thousand voices singing the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel's

"Messiah," it is possible to distinguish the leading voices, but

the differences of training and cultivation between them and the

voices in the chorus, are lost in the unity of purpose and in the

fact that they are all human voices lifted by a high motive.

This is a weak illustration of what a Settlement attempts to do.

It aims, in a measure, to develop whatever of social life its

neighborhood may afford, to focus and give form to that life, to

bring to bear upon it the results of cultivation and training;

but it receives in exchange for the music of isolated voices the

volume and strength of the chorus. It is quite impossible for me

to say in what proportion or degree the subjective necessity

which led to the opening of Hull-House combined the three trends:

first, the desire to interpret democracy in social terms;

secondly, the impulse beating at the very source of our lives,

urging us to aid in the race progress; and, thirdly, the

Christian movement toward humanitarianism. It is difficult to

analyze a living thing; the analysis is at best imperfect. Many

more motives may blend with the three trends; possibly the desire

for a new form of social success due to the nicety of

imagination, which refuses worldly pleasures unmixed with the

joys of self-sacrifice; possibly a love of approbation, so vast

that it is not content with the treble clapping of delicate

hands, but wishes also to hear the bass notes from toughened

palms, may mingle with these.

The Settlement then, is an experimental effort to aid in the

solution of the social and industrial problems which are

engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It

insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of

a city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the

overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the

other; but it assumes that this overaccumulation and destitution

is most sorely felt in the things that pertain to social and

educational privileges. From its very nature it can stand for no

political or social propaganda. It must, in a sense, give the

warm welcome of an inn to all such propaganda, if perchance one of

them be found an angel. The only thing to be dreaded in the

Settlement is that it lose its flexibility, its power of quick

adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment

may demand. It must be open to conviction and must have a deep and

abiding sense of tolerance. It must be hospitable and ready for

experiment. It should demand from its residents a scientific

patience in the accumulation of facts and the steady holding of

their sympathies as one of the best instruments for that

accumulation. It must be grounded in a philosophy whose

foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy

which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a

drunken woman or an idiot boy. Its residents must be emptied of

all conceit of opinion and all self-assertion, and ready to arouse

and interpret the public opinion of their neighborhood. They must

be content to live quietly side by side with their neighbors,

until they grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests.

Their neighbors are held apart by differences of race and

language which the residents can more easily overcome. They are

bound to see the needs of their neighborhood as a whole, to

furnish data for legislation, and to use their influence to secure

it. In short, residents are pledged to devote themselves to the

duties of good citizenship and to the arousing of the social

energies which too largely lie dormant in every neighborhood given

over to industrialism. They are bound to regard the entire life

of their city as organic, to make an effort to unify it, and to

protest against its over-differentiation.

It is always easy to make all philosophy point one particular

moral and all history adorn one particular tale; but I may be

forgiven the reminder that the best speculative philosophy sets

forth the solidarity of the human race; that the highest moralists

have taught that without the advance and improvement of the whole,

no man can hope for any lasting improvement in his own moral or

material individual condition; and that the subjective necessity

for Social Settlements is therefore identical with that necessity,

which urges us on toward social and individual salvation.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Diana Camden.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter VII: Some Early Undertakings at Hull-House." by Jane

Addams (1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 128-153.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER VII

SOME EARLY UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE

If the early American Settlements stood for a more exigent

standard in philanthropic activities, insisting that each new

undertaking should be preceded by carefully ascertained facts,

then certainly Hull-House held to this standard in the opening of

our new coffee-house first started as a public kitchen. An

investigation of the sweatshops had disclosed the fact, that

sewing women during the busy season paid little attention to the

feeding of their families, for it was only by working steadily

through the long day that the scanty pay of five, seven, or nine

cents for finishing a dozen pairs of trousers could be made into

a day's wage; and they bought from the nearest grocery the canned

goods that could be most quickly heated, or gave a few pennies to

the children with which they might secure a lunch from a

neighboring candy shop.

One of the residents made an investigation, at the instance of

the United States Department of Agriculture, into the food values

of the dietaries of the various immigrants, and this was followed

by an investigation made by another resident, for the United

States Department of Labor, into the foods of the Italian colony,

on the supposition that the constant use of imported products

bore a distinct relation to the cost of living. I recall an

Italian who, coming into Hull-House one day as we were sitting at

the dinner table, expressed great surprise that Americans ate a

variety of food, because he believed that they partook only of

potatoes and beer. A little inquiry showed that this conclusion

was drawn from the fact that he lived next to an Irish saloon and

had never seen anything but potatoes going in and beer coming

out.

At that time the New England kitchen was comparatively new in

Boston, and Mrs. Richards, who was largely responsible for its

foundation, hoped that cheaper cuts of meat and simpler

vegetables, if they were subjected to slow and thorough processes

of cooking, might be made attractive and their nutritive value

secured for the people who so sadly needed more nutritious food.

It was felt that this could be best accomplished in public

kitchens, where the advantage of scientific training and careful

supervision could be secured. One of the residents went to

Boston for a training under Mrs. Richards, and when the

Hull-House kitchen was fitted under her guidance and direction,

our hopes ran high for some modification of the food of the

neighborhood. We did not reckon, however, with the wide diversity

in nationality and inherited tastes, and while we sold a certain

amount of the carefully prepared soups and stews in the neigh-

boring factories--a sale which has steadily increased throughout

the years--and were also patronized by a few households, perhaps

the neighborhood estimate was best summed up by the woman who

frankly confessed, that the food was certainly nutritious, but

that she didn't like to eat what was nutritious, that she liked

to eat "what she'd ruther."

If the dietetics were appreciated but slowly, the social value of

the coffee-house and the gymnasium, which were in the same

building, were quickly demonstrated. At that time the saloon

halls were the only places in the neighborhood where the immigrant

could hold his social gatherings, and where he could celebrate

such innocent and legitimate occasions as weddings and christenings.

These halls were rented very cheaply with the understanding that

various sums of money should be "passed across the bar," and it

was considered a mean host or guest who failed to live up to this

implied bargain. The consequence was that many a reputable party

ended with a certain amount of disorder, due solely to the fact

that the social instinct was traded upon and used as a basis for

money making by an adroit host. From the beginning the young

people's clubs had asked for dancing, and nothing was more

popular than the increased space for parties offered by the

gymnasium, with the chance to serve refreshments in the room

below. We tried experiments with every known "soft drink," from

those extracted from an expensive soda water fountain to slender

glasses of grape juice, but so far as drinks were concerned we

never became a rival to the saloon, nor indeed did anyone imagine

that we were trying to do so. I remember one man who looked

about the cozy little room and said, "This would be a nice place

to sit in all day if one could only have beer." But the

coffee-house gradually performed a mission of its own and became

something of a social center to the neighborhood as well as a

real convenience. Business men from the adjacent factories and

school teachers from the nearest public schools, used it

increasingly. The Hull-House students and club members supped

together in little groups or held their reunions and social

banquets, as, to a certain extent, did organizations from all

parts of the town. The experience of the coffee-house taught us

not to hold to preconceived ideas of what the neighborhood ought

to have, but to keep ourselves in readiness to modify and adapt

our undertakings as we discovered those things which the

neighborhood was ready to accept.

Better food was doubtless needed, but more attractive and safer

places for social gatherings were also needed, and the

neighborhood was ready for one and not for the other. We had no

hint then in Chicago of the small parks which were to be

established fifteen years later, containing the halls for dancing

and their own restaurants in buildings where the natural desire

of the young for gayety and social organization, could be safely

indulged. Yet even in that early day a member of the Hull-House

Men's Club who had been appointed superintendent of Douglas Park

had secured there the first public swimming pool, and his fellow

club members were proud of the achievement.

There was in the earliest undertakings at Hull-House a touch of

the artist's enthusiasm when he translates his inner vision

through his chosen material into outward form. Keenly conscious

of the social confusion all about us and the hard economic

struggle, we at times believed that the very struggle itself

might become a source of strength. The devotion of the mothers

to their children, the dread of the men lest they fail to provide

for the family dependent upon their daily exertions, at moments

seemed to us the secret stores of strength from which society is

fed, the invisible array of passion and feeling which are the

surest protectors of the world. We fatuously hoped that we might

pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common

destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract

from life's very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should

be effective against them.

Of course there was always present the harrowing consciousness of

the difference in economic condition between ourselves and our

neighbors. Even if we had gone to live in the most wretched

tenement, there would have always been an essential difference

between them and ourselves, for we should have had a sense of

security in regard to illness and old age and the lack of these

two securities are the specters which most persistently haunt the

poor. Could we, in spite of this, make their individual efforts

more effective through organization and possibly complement them

by small efforts of our own?

Some such vague hope was in our minds when we started the

Hull-House Cooperative Coal Association, which led a vigorous

life for three years, and developed a large membership under the

skillful advice of its one paid officer, an English workingman

who had had experience in cooperative societies at "'ome." Some

of the meetings of the association, in which people met to

consider together their basic dependence upon fire and warmth,

had a curious challenge of life about them. Because the

cooperators knew what it meant to bring forth children in the

midst of privation and to see the tiny creatures struggle for

life, their recitals cut a cross section, as it were, in that

world-old effort--the "dying to live" which so inevitably

triumphs over poverty and suffering. And yet their very

familiarity with hardship may have been responsible for that

sentiment which traditionally ruins business, for a vote of the

cooperators that the basket buyers be given one basket free out

of every six, that the presentation of five purchase tickets

should entitle the holders to a profit in coal instead of stock

"because it would be a shame to keep them waiting for the

dividend," was always pointed to by the conservative

quarter-of-a-ton buyers as the beginning of the end. At any

rate, at the close of the third winter, although the Association

occupied an imposing coal yard on the southeast corner of the

Hull-House block and its gross receipts were between three and

four hundred dollars a day, it became evident that the concern

could not remain solvent if it continued its philanthropic

policy, and the experiment was terminated by the cooperators

taking up their stock in the remaining coal.

Our next cooperative experiment was much more successful, perhaps

because it was much more spontaneous.

At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House during a strike

in a large shoe factory, the discussions made it clear that the

strikers who had been most easily frightened, and therefore first

to capitulate, were naturally those girls who were paying board

and were afraid of being put out if they fell too far behind.

After a recital of a case of peculiar hardship one of them

exclaimed: "Wouldn't it be fine if we had a boarding club of our

own, and then we could stand by each other in a time like this?"

After that events moved quickly. We read aloud together Beatrice

Potter's little book on "Cooperation," and discussed all the

difficulties and fascinations of such an undertaking, and on the

first of May, 1891, two comfortable apartments near Hull-House

were rented and furnished. The Settlement was responsible for

the furniture and paid the first month's rent, but beyond that

the members managed the club themselves. The undertaking

"marched," as the French say, from the very first, and always on

its own feet. Although there were difficulties, none of them

proved insurmountable, which was a matter for great satisfaction

in the face of a statement made by the head of the United States

Department of Labor, who, on a visit to the club when it was but

two years old, said that his department had investigated many

cooperative undertakings, and that none founded and managed by

women had ever succeeded. At the end of the third year the club

occupied all of the six apartments which the original building

contained, and numbered fifty members.

It was in connection with our efforts to secure a building for the

Jane Club, that we first found ourselves in the dilemma between

the needs of our neighbors and the kind-hearted response upon

which we had already come to rely for their relief. The adapted

apartments in which the Jane Club was housed were inevitably more

or less uncomfortable, and we felt that the success of the club

justified the erection of a building for its sole use.

Up to that time, our history had been as the minor peace of the

early Church. We had had the most generous interpretation of our

efforts. Of course, many people were indifferent to the idea of

the Settlement; others looked on with tolerant and sometimes

cynical amusement which we would often encounter in a good story

related at our expense; but all this was remote and unreal to us,

and we were sure that if the critics could but touch "the life of

the people," they would understand.

The situation changed markedly after the Pullman strike, and our

efforts to secure factory legislation later brought upon us a

certain amount of distrust and suspicion; until then we had been

considered merely a kindly philanthropic undertaking whose new

form gave us a certain idealistic glamour. But sterner tests

were coming, and one of the first was in connection with the new

building for the Jane Club. A trustee of Hull-House came to see

us one day with the good news that a friend of his was ready to

give twenty thousand dollars with which to build the desired new

clubhouse. When, however, he divulged the name of his generous

friend, it proved to be that of a man who was notorious for

underpaying the girls in his establishment and concerning whom

there were even darker stories. It seemed clearly impossible to

erect a clubhouse for working girls with such money and we at

once said that we must decline the offer. The trustee of

Hull-House was put in the most embarrassing situation; he had, of

course, induced the man to give the money and had had no thought

but that it would be eagerly received; he would now be obliged to

return with the astonishing, not to say insulting, news that the

money was considered unfit.

In the long discussion which followed, it gradually became clear

to all of us that such a refusal could be valuable only as it

might reveal to the man himself and to others, public opinion in

regard to certain methods of money-making, but that from the very

nature of the case our refusal of this money could not be made

public because a representative of Hull-House had asked for it.

However, the basic fact remained that we could not accept the

money, and of this the trustee himself was fully convinced. This

incident occurred during a period of much discussion concerning

"tainted money" and is perhaps typical of the difficulty of

dealing with it. It is impossible to know how far we may blame

the individual for doing that which all of his competitors and

his associates consider legitimate; at the same time, social

changes can only be inaugurated by those who feel the

unrighteousness of contemporary conditions, and the expression of

their scruples may be the one opportunity for pushing forward

moral tests into that dubious area wherein wealth is accumulated.

In the course of time a new clubhouse was built by an old friend of

Hull-House much interested in working girls, and this has been

occupied for twelve years by the very successful cooperating Jane

Club. The incident of the early refusal is associated in my mind

with a long talk upon the subject of questionable money I held with

the warden of Toynbee Hall, whom I visited at Bristol where he was

then canon in the Cathedral. By way of illustration he showed me a

beautiful little church which had been built by the last

slave-trading merchant in Bristol, who had been much disapproved of

by his fellow townsmen and had hoped by this transmutation of

ill-gotten money into exquisite Gothic architecture to reconcile

himself both to God and man. His impulse to build may have been

born from his own scruples or from the quickened consciences of his

neighbors who saw that the world-old iniquity of enslaving men must

at length come to an end. The Abolitionists may have regarded this

beautiful building as the fruit of a contrite heart, or they may

have scorned it as an attempt to magnify the goodness of a slave

trader and thus perplex the doubting citizens of Bristol in regard

to the entire moral issue.

Canon Barnett did not pronounce judgment on the Bristol merchant.

He was, however, quite clear upon the point that a higher moral

standard for industrial life must be embodied in legislation as

rapidly as possible, that it may bear equally upon all, and that

an individual endeavoring to secure this legislation must forbear

harsh judgment. This was doubtless a sound position, but during

all the period of hot discussion concerning tainted money I never

felt clear enough on the general principle involved, to accept the

many invitations to write and speak upon the subject, although I

received much instruction in the many letters of disapproval sent

to me by radicals of various schools because I was a member of the

university extension staff of the then new University of Chicago,

the righteousness of whose foundation they challenged.

A little incident of this time illustrated to me the confusion in

the minds of a least many older men between religious teaching

and advancing morality. One morning I received a letter from the

head of a Settlement in New York expressing his perplexity over

the fact that his board of trustees had asked money from a man

notorious for his unscrupulous business methods. My

correspondent had placed his resignation in the hands of his

board, that they might accept it at any time when they felt his

utterances on the subject of tainted money were offensive, for he

wished to be free to openly discuss a subject of such grave moral

import. The very morning when my mind was full of the questions

raised by this letter, I received a call from the daughter of the

same business man whom my friend considered so unscrupulous. She

was passing through Chicago and came to ask me to give her some

arguments which she might later use with her father to confute

the charge that Settlements were irreligious. She said, "You

see, he has been asked to give money to our Settlement and would

like to do it, if his conscience was only clear; he disapproves

of Settlements because they give no religious instruction; he has

always been a very devout man."

I remember later discussing the incident with Washington Gladden

who was able to parallel it from his own experience. Now that

this discussion upon tainted money has subsided, it is easy to

view it with a certain detachment impossible at the moment, and

it is even difficult to understand why the feeling should have

been so intense, although it doubtless registered genuine moral

concern.

There was room for discouragement in the many unsuccessful

experiments in cooperation which were carried on in Chicago

during the early nineties; a carpenter shop on Van Buren Street

near Halsted, a labor exchange started by the unemployed, not so

paradoxical an arrangement as it seems, and a very ambitious plan

for a country colony which was finally carried out at Ruskin,

Tennessee. In spite of failures, cooperative schemes went on,

some of the same men appearing in one after another with

irrepressible optimism. I remember during a cooperative

congress, which met at Hull-House in the World's Fair summer that

Mr. Henry D. Lloyd, who collected records of cooperative

experiments with the enthusiasm with which other men collect

coins or pictures, put before the congress some of the remarkable

successes in Ireland and North England, which he later embodied

in his book on "Copartnership." One of the old-time cooperators

denounced the modern method as "too much like cut-throat

business" and declared himself in favor of "principles which may

have failed over and over again, but are nevertheless as sound as

the law of gravitation." Mr. Lloyd and I agreed that the fiery

old man presented as fine a spectacle of devotion to a lost cause

as either of us had ever seen, although we both possessed

memories well stored with such romantic attachments.

And yet this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in

competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is

coming to pass all over the face of the earth. Five years later

in the same Hull-House hall in which the cooperative congress was

held, an Italian senator told a large audience of his fellow

countrymen of the successful system of cooperative banks in north

Italy and of their cooperative methods of selling produce to the

value of millions of francs annually; still later Sir Horace

Plunkett related the remarkable successes in cooperation in

Ireland.

I have seldom been more infected by enthusiasm than I once was in

Dulwich at a meeting of English cooperators where I was fairly

overwhelmed by the fervor underlying the businesslike proceedings

of the congress, and certainly when I served as a juror in the

Paris Exposition of 1900, nothing in the entire display in the

department of Social Economy was so imposing as the building

housing the exhibit, which had been erected by cooperative

trades-unions without the assistance of a single contractor.

And so one's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a

realized ideal of better human relations. At least traces of

successful cooperation are found even in individualistic America.

I recall my enthusiasm on the day when I set forth to lecture at

New Harmony, Indiana, for I had early been thrilled by the tale

of Robert Owen, as every young person must be who is interested

in social reform; I was delighted to find so much of his spirit

still clinging to the little town which had long ago held one of

his ardent experiments, although the poor old cooperators, who

for many years claimed friendship at Hull-House because they

heard that we "had once tried a cooperative coal association,"

might well have convinced me of the persistency of the

cooperative ideal.

Many experiences in those early years, although vivid, seemed to

contain no illumination; nevertheless they doubtless permanently

affected our judgments concerning what is called crime and vice.

I recall a series of striking episodes on the day when I took the

wife and child, as well as the old godfather, of an Italian

convict to visit him in the State Penitentiary. When we

approached the prison, the sight of its heavy stone walls and

armed sentries threw the godfather into a paroxysm of rage; he

cast his hat upon the ground and stamped upon it, tore his hair,

and loudly fulminated in weird Italian oaths, until one of the

guards, seeing his strange actions, came to inquire if "the

gentleman was having a fit." When we finally saw the convict, his

wife, to my extreme distress, talked of nothing but his striped

clothing, until the poor man wept with chagrin. Upon our return

journey to Chicago, the little son aged eight presented me with

two oranges, so affectionately and gayly that I was filled with

reflections upon the advantage of each generation making a fresh

start, when the train boy, finding the stolen fruit in my lap,

violently threatened to arrest the child. But stranger than any

episode was the fact itself that neither the convict, his wife,

nor his godfather for a moment considered him a criminal. He had

merely gotten excited over cards and had stabbed his adversary

with a knife. "Why should a man who took his luck badly be kept

forever from the sun?" was their reiterated inquiry.

I recall our perplexity over the first girls who had "gone

astray"--the poor, little, forlorn objects, fifteen and sixteen

years old, with their moral natures apparently untouched and

unawakened; one of them whom the police had found in a

professional house and asked us to shelter for a few days until

she could be used as a witness, was clutching a battered doll

which she had kept with her during her six months of an "evil

life." Two of these prematurely aged children came to us one day

directly from the maternity ward of the Cook County hospital,

each with a baby in her arms, asking for protection, because they

did not want to go home for fear of "being licked." For them were

no jewels nor idle living such as the storybooks portrayed. The

first of the older women whom I knew came to Hull-House to ask

that her young sister, who was about to arrive from Germany,

might live near us; she wished to find her respectable work and

wanted her to have the "decent pleasures" that Hull-House

afforded. After the arrangement had been completed and I had in

a measure recovered from my astonishment at the businesslike way

in which she spoke of her own life, I ventured to ask her

history. In a very few words she told me that she had come from

Germany as a music teacher to an American family. At the end of

two years, in order to avoid a scandal involving the head of the

house, she had come to Chicago where her child was born, but when

the remittances ceased after its death, finding herself without

home and resources, she had gradually become involved in her

present mode of life. By dint of utilizing her family

solicitude, we finally induced her to move into decent lodgings

before her sister arrived, and for a difficult year she supported

herself by her exquisite embroidery. At the end of that time,

she gave up the struggle, the more easily as her young sister,

well established in the dressmaking department of a large shop,

had begun to suspect her past life.

But discouraging as these and other similar efforts often were,

nevertheless the difficulties were infinitely less in those days

when we dealt with "fallen girls" than in the years following

when the "white slave traffic" became gradually established and

when agonized parents, as well as the victims themselves, were

totally unable to account for the situation. In the light of

recent disclosures, it seems as if we were unaccountably dull not

to have seen what was happening, especially to the Jewish girls

among whom "the home trade of the white slave traffic" was first

carried on and who were thus made to break through countless

generations of chastity. We early encountered the difficulties

of that old problem of restoring the woman, or even the child,

into the society she has once outraged. I well remember our

perplexity when we attempted to help two girls straight from a

Virginia tobacco factory, who had been decoyed into a

disreputable house when innocently seeking a lodging on the late

evening of their arrival. Although they had been rescued

promptly, the stigma remained, and we found it impossible to

permit them to join any of the social clubs connected with

Hull-House, not so much because there was danger of

contamination, as because the parents of the club members would

have resented their presence most hotly. One of our trustees

succeeded in persuading a repentant girl, fourteen years old,

whom we tried to give a fresh start in another part of the city,

to attend a Sunday School class of a large Chicago church. The

trustee hoped that the contact with nice girls, as well as the

moral training, would help the poor child on her hard road. But

unfortunately tales of her shortcomings reached the

superintendent who felt obliged, in order to protect the other

girls, to forbid her the school. She came back to tell us about

it, defiant as well as discouraged, and had it not been for the

experience with our own clubs, we could easily have joined her

indignation over a church which "acted as if its Sunday School

was a show window for candy kids."

In spite of poignant experiences or, perhaps, because of them,

the memory of the first years at Hull-House is more or less

blurred with fatigue, for we could of course become accustomed

only gradually to the unending activity and to the confusion of a

house constantly filling and refilling with groups of people.

The little children who came to the kindergarten in the morning

were followed by the afternoon clubs of older children, and those

in turn made way for the educational and social organizations of

adults, occupying every room in the house every evening. All

one's habits of living had to be readjusted, and any student's

tendency to sit with a book by the fire was of necessity

definitely abandoned.

To thus renounce "the luxury of personal preference" was,

however, a mere trifle compared to our perplexity over the

problems of an industrial neighborhood situated in an unorganized

city. Life pressed hard in many directions and yet it has always

seemed to me rather interesting that when we were so distressed

over its stern aspects and so impressed with the lack of

municipal regulations, the first building erected for Hull-House

should have been designed for an art gallery, for although it

contained a reading-room on the first floor and a studio above,

the largest space on the second floor was carefully designed and

lighted for art exhibits, which had to do only with the

cultivation of that which appealed to the powers of enjoyment as

over against a wage-earning capacity. It was also significant

that a Chicago business man, fond of pictures himself, responded

to this first appeal of the new and certainly puzzling

undertaking called a Settlement.

The situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that at the time

the building was erected in 1891, our free lease of the land upon

which Hull-House stood expired in 1895. The donor of the building,

however, overcame the difficulty by simply calling his gift a

donation of a thousand dollars a year. This restriction of course

necessitated the simplest sort of a structure, although I remember

on the exciting day when the new building was promised to us, that

I looked up my European notebook which contained the record of my

experience in Ulm, hoping that I might find a description of what I

then thought "a Cathedral of Humanity" ought to be. The

description was "low and widespreading as to include all men in

fellowship and mutual responsibility even as the older pinnacles

and spires indicated communion with God." The description did not

prove of value as an architectural motive I am afraid, although the

architects, who have remained our friends through all the years,

performed marvels with a combination of complicated demands and

little money. At the moment when I read this girlish outbreak it

gave me much comfort, for in those days in addition to our other

perplexities Hull-House was often called irreligious.

These first buildings were very precious to us and it afforded us

the greatest pride and pleasure as one building after another was

added to the Hull-House group. They clothed in brick and mortar

and made visible to the world that which we were trying to do;

they stated to Chicago that education and recreation ought to be

extended to the immigrants. The boys came in great numbers to

our provisional gymnasium fitted up in a former saloon, and it

seemed to us quite as natural that a Chicago man, fond of

athletics, should erect a building for them, as that the boys

should clamor for more room.

I do not wish to give a false impression, for we were often

bitterly pressed for money and worried by the prospect of unpaid

bills, and we gave up one golden scheme after another because we

could not afford it; we cooked the meals and kept the books and

washed the windows without a thought of hardship if we thereby

saved money for the consummation of some ardently desired

undertaking.

But in spite of our financial stringency, I always believed that

money would be given when we had once clearly reduced the

Settlement idea to the actual deed. This chapter, therefore,

would be incomplete if it did not record a certain theory of

nonresistance or rather universal good will which I had worked

out in connection with the Settlement idea and which was later so

often and so rudely disturbed. At that time I had come to

believe that if the activities of Hull-House were ever

misunderstood, it would be either because there was not time to

fully explain or because our motives had become mixed, for I was

convinced that disinterested action was like truth or beauty in

its lucidity and power of appeal.

But more gratifying than any understanding or response from

without could possibly be, was the consciousness that a growing

group of residents was gathering at Hull-House, held together in

that soundest of all social bonds, the companionship of mutual

interests. These residents came primarily because they were

genuinely interested in the social situation and believed that

the Settlement was valuable as a method of approach to it. A

house in which the men residents lived was opened across the

street, and at the end of the first five years the Hull-House

residential force numbered fifteen, a majority of whom still

remain identified with the Settlement.

Even in those early years we caught glimpses of the fact that

certain social sentiments, which are "the difficult and

cumulating product of human growth" and which like all higher

aims live only by communion and fellowship, are cultivated most

easily in the fostering soil of a community life.

Occasionally I obscurely felt as if a demand were being made upon

us for a ritual which should express and carry forward the hope

of the social movement. I was constantly bewildered by the

number of requests I received to officiate at funeral services

and by the curious confessions made to me by total strangers.

For a time I accepted the former and on one awful occasion

furnished "the poetic part" of a wedding ceremony really

performed by a justice of the peace, but I soon learned to

steadfastly refuse such offices, although I saw that for many

people without church affiliations the vague humanitarianism the

Settlement represented was the nearest approach they could find

to an expression of their religious sentiments.

These hints of what the Settlement might mean to at least a few

spirits among its contemporaries became clear to me for the first

time one summer's day in rural England, when I discussed with John

Trevor his attempts to found a labor church and his desire to turn

the toil and danger attached to the life of the workingman into

the means of a universal fellowship. That very year a papyrus

leaf brought to the British Museum from Egypt, containing among

other sayings of Jesus, "Raise the stone, and there thou shalt

find me; cleave the wood and I am there," was a powerful reminder

to all England of the basic relations between daily labor and

Christian teaching.

In those early years at Hull-House we were, however, in no danger

of losing ourselves in mazes of speculation or mysticism, and there

was shrewd penetration in a compliment I received from one of our

Scotch neighbors. He came down Polk Street as I was standing near

the foundations of our new gymnasium, and in response to his

friendly remark that "Hull-House was spreading out," I replied that

"Perhaps we were spreading out too fast." "Oh, no," he rejoined,

"you can afford to spread out wide, you are so well planted in the

mud," giving the compliment, however, a practical turn, as he

glanced at the deep mire on the then unpaved street. It was this

same condition of Polk Street which had caused the crown prince of

Belgium when he was brought upon a visit to Hull-House to shake his

head and meditatively remark, "There is not such a street--no, not

one--in all the territory of Belgium."

At the end of five years the residents of Hull-House published

some first found facts and our reflections thereon in a book

called "Hull-House Maps and Papers." The maps were taken from

information collected by one of the residents for the United

States Bureau of Labor in the investigation into "the slums of

great cities" and the papers treated of various neighborhood

matters with candor and genuine concern if not with skill. The

first edition became exhausted in two years, and apparently the

Boston publisher did not consider the book worthy of a second.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Jill Thoren.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter VIII: Problems of Poverty." by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by

Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp.

154-176.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

CHAPTER VII

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY

That neglected and forlorn old age is daily brought to the

attention of a Settlement which undertakes to bear its share of

the neighborhood burden imposed by poverty, was pathetically

clear to us during our first months of residence at Hull-House.

One day a boy of ten led a tottering old lady into the House,

saying that she had slept for six weeks in their kitchen on a bed

made up next to the stove; that she had come when her son died,

although none of them had ever seen her before; but because her

son had "once worked in the same shop with Pa she thought of him

when she had nowhere to go." The little fellow concluded by

saying that our house was so much bigger than theirs that he

thought we would have more roomfor beds. The old woman herself

said absolutely nothing, but looking on with that gripping fear

of the poorhouse in her eyes, she was a living embodiment of that

dread which is so heartbreaking that the occupants of the County

Infirmary themselves seem scarcely less wretched than those who

are making their last stand against it.

This look was almost more than I could bear for only a few days

before some frightened women had bidden me come quickly to the

house of an old German woman, whom two men from the country

agent's office were attempting to remove to the County Infirmary.

The poor old creature had thrown herself bodily upon a small and

battered chest of drawers and clung there, clutching it so firmly

that it would have been impossible to remove her without also

taking the piece of furniture . She did not weep nor moan nor

indeed make any human sound, but between her broken gasps for

breath she squealed shrilly like a frightened animal caught in a

trap. The little group of women and children gathered at her

door stood aghast at this realization of the black dread which

always clouds the lives of the very poor when work is slack, but

which constantly grows more imminent and threatening as old age

approaches. The neighborhood women and I hastened to make all

sorts of promises as to the support of the old woman and the

country officials, only too glad to be rid of their unhappy duty,

left her to our ministrations. This dread of the poorhouse, the

result of centuries of deterrent Poor Law administration, seemed

to me not without some justification one summer when I found

myself perpetually distressed by the unnecessary idleness and

forlornness of the old women in the Cook County Infirmary, many

of whom I had known in the years when activity was still a

necessity, and when they yet felt bustlingly important. To take

away from an old woman whose life has been spent in household

cares all the foolish little belongings to which her affections

cling and to which her very fingers have become accustomed, is to

take away her last incentive to activity, almost to life itself.

To give an old woman only a chair and a bed, to leave her no

cupboard in which her treasures may be stowed, not only that she

may take them out when she desires occupation, but that their

mind may dwell upon them in moments of revery, is to reduce

living almost beyond the limit of human endurance.

The poor creature who clung so desperately to her chest of

drawers was really clinging to the last remnant of normal

living--a symbol of all she was asked to renounce. For several

years after this summer I invited five or six old women to take a

two weeks' vacation from the poorhouse which was eagerly and even

gayly accepted. Almost all the old men in the County Infirmary

wander away each summer taking their chances for finding food or

shelter and return much refreshed by the little "tramp," but the

old women cannot do this unless they have some help from the

outside, and yet the expenditure of a very little money secures

for them the coveted vacation. I found that a few pennies paid

their car fare into town, a dollar a week procured lodging with

an old acquaintance; assured of two good meals a day in the

Hull-House coffee-house they could count upon numerous cups of

tea among old friends to whom they would airily state that they

had "come out for a little change" and hadn't yet made up their

minds about "going in again for the winter." They thus enjoyed a

two weeks' vacation to the top of their bent and returned with

wondrous tales of their adventures, with which they regaled the

other paupers during the long winter.

The reminiscences of these old women, their shrewd comments upon

life, their sense of having reached a point where they may at

last speak freely with nothing to lose because of their

frankness, makes them often the most delightful of companions. I

recall one of my guests, the mother of many scattered children,

whose one bright spot through all the dreary years had been the

wedding feast of her son Mike,--a feast which had become

transformed through long meditation into the nectar and ambrosia

of the very gods. As a farewell fling before she went "in"

again, we dined together upon chicken pie, but it did not taste

like the "the chicken pie at Mike's wedding" and she was

disappointed after all.

Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and

serenity which one would fain associate with old age. I recall

the dying hour of one old Scotchwoman whose long struggle to

"keep respectable" had so embittered her that her last words were

gibes and taunts for those who were trying to minister to her.

"So you came in yourself this morning, did you? You only sent

things yesterday. I guess you knew when the doctor was coming.

Don't try to warm my feet with anything but that old jacket that

I've got there; it belonged to my boy who was drowned at sea nigh

thirty years ago, but it's warmer yet with human feelings than

any of your damned charity hot-water bottles." Suddenly the harsh

gasping voice was stilled in death and I awaited the doctor's

coming shaken and horrified.

The lack of municipal regulation already referred to was, in the

early days of Hull-House, parallelled by the inadequacy of the

charitable efforts of the city and an unfounded optimism that

there was no real poverty among us. Twenty years ago there was no

Charity Organization Society in Chicago and the Visiting Nurse

Association had not yet begun its beneficial work, while the

relief societies, although conscientiously administered, were

inadequate in extent and antiquated in method.

As social reformers gave themselves over to discussion of general

principles, so the poor invariably accused poverty itself of their

destruction. I recall a certain Mrs. Moran, who was returning one

rainy day from the office of the county agent with her arms full of

paper bags containing beans and flour which alone lay between her

children and starvation. Although she had no money she boarded a

street car in order to save her booty from complete destruction by

the rain, and as the burst bags dropped "flour on the ladies'

dresses" and ""beans all over the place," she was sharply

reprimanded by the conductor, who was the further exasperated when

he discovered she had no fare. He put her off, as she had hoped he

would, almost in front of Hull-House. She related to us her state

of mind as she stepped off the car and saw the last of her wares

disappearing; she admitted she forgot the proprieties and "cursed a

little," but, curiously enough, she pronounced her malediction, not

against the rain nor the conductor, nor yet against the worthless

husband who had been set up to the city prison, but, true to the

Chicago spirit of the moment, went to the root of the matter and

roundly "cursed poverty."

This spirit of generalization and lack of organization among the

charitable forces of the city was painfully revealed in that

terrible winter after the World's Fair, when the general

financial depression throughout the country was much intensified

in Chicago by the numbers of unemployed stranded at the close of

the exposition. When the first cold weather came the police

stations and the very corridors of the city hall were crowded by

men who could afford no other lodging. They made huge

demonstrations on the lake front, reminding one of the London

gatherings in Trafalgar Square.

It was the winter in which Mr. Stead wrote his indictment of

Chicago. I can vividly recall his visits to Hull-House, some of

them between eleven and twelve o'clock at night, when he would

come in wet and hungry from an investigation of the levee

district, and while he was drinking hot chocolate before an open

fire, would relate in one of his curious monologues, his

experience as an out-of-door laborer standing in line without an

overcoat for two hours in the sleet, that he might have a chance

to sweep the streets; or his adventures with a crook, who mistook

him for one of this own kind and offered him a place as an agent

for a gambling house, which he promptly accepted. Mr. Stead was

much impressed with the mixed goodness in Chicago, the lack of

rectitude in many high places, the simple kindness of the most

wretched to each other. Before he published "If Christ Came to

Chicago" he made his attempt to rally the diverse moral forces of

the city in a huge mass meeting, which resulted in a temporary

organization, later developing into the Civic Federation. I was

a member of the committee of five appointed to carry out the

suggestions made in this remarkable meeting, and or first concern

was to appoint a committee to deal with the unemployed. But when

has a committee ever dealt satisfactorily with the unemployed?

Relief stations were opened in various part of the city,

temporary lodging houses were established, Hull-House undertaking

to lodge the homeless women who could be received nowhere else;

employment stations were opened giving sewing to the women, and

street sweeping for the men was organized. It was in connection

with the latter that the perplexing question of the danger of

permanently lowering wages at such a crisis, in the praiseworthy

effort to bring speedy relief, was brought home to me. I

insisted that it was better to have the men work half a day for

seventy-five cents than a whole day for a dollar, better that

they should earn three dollars in two days than in three days. I

resigned from the street-cleaning committee in despair of making

the rest of the committee understand that, as our real object was

not street cleaning but the help of the unemployed, we must treat

the situation in such wise that the men would not be worse off

when they returned to their normal occupations. The discussion

opened up situations new to me and carried me far afield in

perhaps the most serious economic reading I have ever done.

A beginning also was then made toward a Bureau of Organized

Charities, the main office being put in charge of a young man

recently come from Boston, who lived at Hull-House. But to

employ scientific methods for the first time at such a moment

involved difficulties, and the most painful episode of the winter

came for me from an attempt on my part to conform to carefully

received instructions. A shipping clerk whom I had known for a

long time had lost his place, as so many people had that year,

and came to the relief station established at Hull-House four or

five times to secure help for his family. I told him one day of

the opportunity for work on the drainage canal and intimated that

if any employment were obtainable, he ought to exhaust that

possibility before asking for help. The man replied that he had

always worked indoors and that he could not endure outside work

in winter. I am grateful to remember that I was too uncertain to

be severe, although I held to my instructions. He did not come

again for relief, but worked for two days digging on the canal,

where he contracted pneumonia and died a week later. I have

never lost trace of the two little children he left behind him,

although I cannot see them without a bitter consciousness that it

was at their expense I learned that life cannot be administered

by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a

man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life

and habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is

almost sure to invite blundering.

It was also during this winter that I became permanently

impressed with the kindness of the poor to each other; the woman

who lives upstairs will willingly share her breakfast with the

family below because she knows they "are hard up"; the man who

boarded with them last winter will give a month's rent because he

knows the father of the family is out of work; the baker across

the street who is fast being pushed to the wall by his downtown

competitors, will send across three loaves of stale bread because

he has seen the children looking longingly into his window and

suspects they are hungry. There are also the families who,

during times of business depression, are obliged to seek help

from the county or some benevolent society, but who are

themselves most anxious not to be confounded with the pauper

class, with whom indeed they do not in the least belong. Charles

Booth, in his brilliant chapter on the unemployed, expresses

regret that the problems of the working class are so often

confounded with the problems of the inefficient and the idle,

that although working people live in the same street with those

in need of charity, to thus confound two problems is to render

the solution of both impossible.

I remember one family in which the father had been out of work

for this same winter, most of the furniture had been pawned, and

as the worn-out shoes could not be replaced the children could

not go to school. The mother was ill and barely able to come for

the supplies and medicines. Two years later she invited me to

supper one Sunday evening in the little home which had been

completely restored, and she gave as a reason for the invitation

that she couldn't bear to have me remember them as they had been

during that one winter, which she insisted had been unique in her

twelve years of married life. She said that it was as if she had

met me, not as I am ordinarily, but as I should appear misshapen

with rheumatism or with a face distorted by neuralgic pain; that

it was not fair to judge poor people that way. She perhaps

unconsciously illustrated the difference between the

relief-station relation to the poor and the Settlement relation

to its neighbors, the latter wishing to know them through all the

varying conditions of life, to stand by when they are in

distress, but by no means to drop intercourse with them when

normal prosperity has returned, enabling the relation to become

more social and free from economic disturbance.

Possibly something of the same effort has to be made within the

Settlement itself to keep its own sense of proportion in regard

to the relation of the crowded city quarter to the rest of the

country. It was in the spring following this terrible winter,

during a journey to meet lecture engagements in California, that

I found myself amazed at the large stretches of open country and

prosperous towns through which we passed day by day, whose

existence I had quite forgotten.

In the latter part of the summer of 1895, I served as a member on

a commission appointed by the mayor of Chicago, to investigate

conditions in the county poorhouse, public attention having

become centered on it through one of those distressing stories,

which exaggerates the wrong in a public institution while at the

same time it reveals conditions which need to be rectified.

However necessary publicity is for securing reformed

administration, however useful such exposures may be for

political purposes, the whole is attended by such a waste of the

most precious human emotions, by such a tearing of living tissue,

that it can scarcely be endured. Every time I entered Hull-House

during the days of the investigation, I would find waiting for me

from twenty to thirty people whose friends and relatives were in

the suspected institution, all in such acute distress of mind

that to see them was to look upon the victims of deliberate

torture. In most cases my visitor would state that it seemed

impossible to put their invalids in any other place, but if these

stories were true, something must be done. Many of the patients

were taken out only to be returned after a few days or weeks to

meet the sullen hostility of their attendants and with their own

attitude changed from confidence to timidity and alarm.

This piteous dependence of the poor upon the good will of public

officials was made clear to us in an early experience with a

peasant woman straight from the fields of Germany, whom we met

during our first six months at Hull-House. Her four years in

America had been spent in patiently carrying water up and down

two flights of stairs, and in washing the heavy flannel suits of

iron foundry workers. For this her pay had averaged thirty-five

cents a day. Three of her daughters had fallen victims to the

vice of the city. The mother was bewildered and distressed, but

understood nothing. We were able to induce the betrayer of one

daughter to marry her; the second, after a tedious lawsuit,

supported his child; with the third we were able to do nothing.

This woman is now living with her family in a little house

seventeen miles from the city. She has made two payments on her

land and is a lesson to all beholders as she pastures her cow up

and down the railroad tracks and makes money from her ten acres.

She did not need charity for she had an immense capacity for hard

work, but she sadly needed the service of the State's attorney

office, enforcing the laws designed for the protection of such

girls as her daughters.

We early found ourselves spending many hours in efforts to secure

support for deserted women, insurance for bewildered widows,

damages for injured operators, furniture from the clutches of the

installment store. The Settlement is valuable as an information

and interpretation bureau. It constantly acts between the

various institutions of the city and the people for whose benefit

these institutions were erected. The hospitals, the county

agencies, and State asylums are often but vague rumors to the

people who need them most. Another function of the Settlement to

its neighborhood resembles that of the big brother whose mere

presence on the playground protects the little one from bullies.

We early learned to know the children of hard-driven mothers who

went out to work all day, sometimes leaving the little things in

the casual care of a neighbor, but often locking them into their

tenement rooms. The first three crippled children we encountered

in the neighborhood had all been injured while their mothers were

at work: one had fallen out of a third-story window, another had

been burned, and the third had a curved spine due to the fact that

for three years he had been tied all day long to the leg of the

kitchen table, only released at noon by his older brother who

hastily ran in from a neighboring factory to share his lunch with

him. When the hot weather came the restless children could not

brook the confinement of the stuffy rooms, and, as it was not

considered safe to leave the doors open because of sneak thieves,

many of the children were locked out. During our first summer an

increasing number of these poor little mites would wander into the

cool hallway of Hull-House. We kept them there and fed them at

noon, in return for which we were sometimes offered a hot penny

which had been held in a tight little fist "ever since mother left

this morning, to buy something to eat with." Out of kindergarten

hours our little guests noisily enjoyed the hospitality of our

bedrooms under the so-called care of any resident who volunteered

to keep an eye on them, but later they were moved into a

neighboring apartment under more systematic supervision.

Hull-House was thus committed to a day nursery which we sustained

for sixteen years first in a little cottage on a side street and

then in a building designed for its use called the Children's

House. It is now carried on by the United Charities of Chicago

in a finely equipped building on our block, where the immigrant

mothers are cared for as well as the children, and where they are

taught the things which will make life in America more possible.

Our early day nursery brought us into natural relations with the

poorest women of the neighborhood, many of whom were bearing the

burden of dissolute and incompetent husbands in addition to the

support of their children. Some of them presented an impressive

manifestation of that miracle of affection which outlives abuse,

neglect, and crime,--the affection which cannot be plucked from

the heart where it has lived, although it may serve only to

torture and torment. "Has your husband come back?" you inquire

of Mrs. S., whom you have known for eight years as an overworked

woman bringing her three delicate children every morning to the

nursery; she is bent under the double burden of earning the money

which supports them and giving them the tender care which alone

keeps them alive. The oldest two children have at last gone to

work, and Mrs. S. has allowed herself the luxury of staying at

home two days a week. And now the worthless husband is back

again--the "gentlemanly gambler" type who, through all

vicissitudes, manages to present a white shirtfront and a gold

watch to the world, but who is dissolute, idle and extravagant.

You dread to think how much his presence will increase the drain

upon the family exchequer, and you know that he stayed away until

he was certain that the children were old enough to earn money

for his luxuries. Mrs. S. does not pretend to take his return

lightly, but she replies in all seriousness and simplicity, "You

know my feeling for him has never changed. You may think me

foolish, but I was always proud of his good looks and educated

appearance. I was lonely and homesick during those eight years

when the children were little and needed so much doctoring, but I

could never bring myself to feel hard toward him, and I used to

pray the good Lord to keep him from harm and bring him back to

us; so, of course, I'm thankful now." She passes on with a

dignity which gives one a new sense of the security of affection.

I recall a similar case of a woman who had supported her three

children for five years, during which time her dissolute husband

constantly demanded money for drink and kept her perpetually

worried and intimidated. One Saturday, before the "blessed

Easter," he came back from a long debauch, ragged and filthy, but

in a state of lachrymose repentance. The poor wife received him

as a returned prodigal, believed that his remorse would prove

lasting, and felt sure that if she and the children went to

church with him on Easter Sunday and he could be induced to take

the pledge before the priest, all their troubles would be ended.

After hours of vigorous effort and the expenditure of all her

savings, he finally sat on the front doorstep the morning of

Easter Sunday, bathed, shaved and arrayed in a fine new suit of

clothes. She left him sitting there in the reluctant spring

sunshine while she finished washing and dressing the children.

When she finally opened the front door with the three shining

children that they might all set forth together, the returned

prodigal had disappeared, and was not seen again until midnight,

when he came back in a glorious state of intoxication from the

proceeds of his pawned clothes and clad once more in the dingiest

attire. She took him in without comment, only to begin again the

wretched cycle. There were of course instances of the criminal

husband as well as of the merely vicious. I recall one woman

who, during seven years, never missed a visiting day at the

penitentiary when she might see her husband, and whose little

children in the nursery proudly reported the messages from father

with no notion that he was in disgrace, so absolutely did they

reflect the gallant spirit of their mother.

While one was filled with admiration for these heroic women,

something was also to be said for some of the husbands, for the

sorry men who, for one reason or another, had failed in the

struggle of life. Sometimes this failure was purely economic and

the men were competent to give the children, whom they were not

able to support, the care and guidance and even education which

were of the highest value. Only a few months ago I met upon the

street one of the early nursery mothers who for five years had

been living in another part of the city, and in response to my

query as to the welfare of her five children, she bitterly

replied, "All of them except Mary have been arrested at one time

or another, thank you." In reply to my remark that I thought her

husband had always had such admirable control over them, she

burst out, "That has been the whole trouble. I got tired taking

care of him and didn't believe that his laziness was all due to

his health, as he said, so I left him and said that I would

support the children, but not him. From that minute the trouble

with the four boys began. I never knew what they were doing, and

after every sort of a scrape I finally put Jack and the twins

into institutions where I pay for them. Joe has gone to work at

last, but with a disgraceful record behind him. I tell you I

ain't so sure that because a woman can make big money that she

can be both father and mother to her children."

As I walked on, I could but wonder in which particular we are

most stupid--to judge a man's worth so solely by his wage-earning

capacity that a good wife feels justified in leaving him, or in

holding fast to that wretched delusion that a woman can both

support and nurture her children.

One of the most piteous revelations of the futility of the latter

attempt came to me through the mother of "Goosie," as the

children for years called a little boy who, because he was

brought to the nursery wrapped up in his mother's shawl, always

had his hair filled with the down and small feathers from the

feather brush factory where she worked. One March morning,

Goosie's mother was hanging out the washing on a shed roof before

she left for the factory. Five-year-old Goosie was trotting at

her heels handing her clothes pins, when he was suddenly blown

off the roof by the high wind into the alley below. His neck was

broken by the fall, and as he lay piteous and limp on a pile of

frozen refuse, his mother cheerily called him to "climb up

again," so confident do overworked mothers become that their

children cannot get hurt. After the funeral, as the poor mother

sat in the nursery postponing the moment when she must go back to

her empty rooms, I asked her, in a futile effort to be of

comfort, if there was anything more we could do for her. The

overworked, sorrow-stricken woman looked up and replied, "If you

could give me my wages for to-morrow, I would not go to work in

the factory at all. I would like to stay at home all day and

hold the baby. Goosie was always asking me to take him and I

never had any time." This statement revealed the condition of

many nursery mothers who are obliged to forego the joys and

solaces which belong to even the most poverty-stricken. The long

hours of factory labor necessary for earning the support of a

child leave no time for the tender care and caressing which may

enrich the life of the most piteous baby.

With all of the efforts made by modern society to nurture and

educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of

young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the

world! It is curiously inconsistent that with the emphasis which

this generation has placed upon the mother and upon the

prolongation of infancy, we constantly allow the waste of this

most precious material. I cannot recall without indignation a

recent experience. I was detained late one evening in an office

building by a prolonged committee meeting of the Board of

Education. As I came out at eleven o'clock, I met in the

corridor of the fourteenth floor a woman whom I knew, on her

knees scrubbing the marble tiling. As she straightened up to

greet me, she seemed so wet from her feet up to her chin, that I

hastily inquired the cause. Her reply was that she left home at

five o'clock every night and had no opportunity for six hours to

nurse her baby. Her mother's milk mingled with the very water

with which she scrubbed the floors until she should return at

midnight, heated and exhausted, to feed her screaming child with

what remained within her breasts.

These are only a few of the problems connected with the lives of

the poorest people with whom the residents in a Settlement are

constantly brought in contact.

I cannot close this chapter without a reference to that gallant

company of men and women among whom my acquaintance is so large,

who are fairly indifferent to starvation itself because of their

preoccupation with higher ends. Among them are visionaries and

enthusiasts, unsuccessful artists, writers, and reformers. For

many years at Hull-House, we knew a well-bred German woman who was

completely absorbed in the experiment of expressing musical

phrases and melodies by means of colors. Because she was small

and deformed, she stowed herself into her trunk every night, where

she slept on a canvas stretched hammock-wise from the four corners

and her food was of the meagerest; nevertheless if a visitor left

an offering upon her table, it was largely spent for apparatus or

delicately colored silk floss, with which to pursue the

fascinating experiment. Another sadly crippled old woman, the

widow of a sea captain, although living almost exclusively upon

malted milk tablets as affording a cheap form of prepared food,

was always eager to talk of the beautiful illuminated manuscripts

she had sought out in her travels and to show specimens of her own

work as an illuminator. Still another of these impressive old

women was an inveterate inventor. Although she had seen prosperous

days in England, when we knew her, she subsisted largely upon the

samples given away at the demonstration counters of the department

stores, and on bits of food which she cooked on a coal shovel in

the furnace of the apartment house whose basement back room she

occupied. Although her inventions were not practicable, various

experts to whom they were submitted always pronounced them

suggestive and ingenious. I once saw her receive this

complimentary verdict--"this ribbon to stick in her coat"--with

such dignity and gravity that the words of condolence for her

financial disappointment, died upon my lips.

These indomitable souls are but three out of many whom I might

instance to prove that those who are handicapped in the race for

life's goods, sometimes play a magnificent trick upon the jade,

life herself, by ceasing to know whether or not they possess any

of her tawdry goods and chattels.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK

Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers. Initial text

entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of

volunteer Flo Carrierre.

"I am a full-time staff at University, continuing my studies on a

part-time basis. I volunteer in the community, and thank you for

giving me the opportunity to make a difference in the Celebration

of Women Writers by contributing time to enter book

chapters."--Flo Carrierre.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

"Chapter IX: A Decade of Economic Discussion." by Jane Addams

(1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with

Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan

Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 177-197.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]