A DECADE OF ECONOMIC DISCUSSION
The Hull-House residents were often bewildered by the desire for
constant discussion which characterized Chicago twenty years ago,
for although the residents in the early Settlements were in many
cases young persons who had sought relief from the consciousness
of social maladjustment in the "anodyne of work" afforded by
philanthropic and civic activities, their former experiences had
not thrown them into company with radicals. The decade between
1890-1900 was, in Chicago, a period of propaganda as over against
constructive social effort; the moment for marching and carrying
banners, for stating general principles and making a
demonstration, rather than the time for uncovering the situation
and for providing the legal measures and the civic organization
through which new social hopes might make themselves felt.
When Hull-House was established in 1889, the events of the
Haymarket riot were already two years old, but during that time
Chicago had apparently gone through the first period of
repressive measures, and in the winter of 1889-1890, by the
advice and with the active participation of its leading citizens,
the city had reached the conclusion that the only cure for the
acts of anarchy was free speech and an open discussion of the
ills of which the opponents of government complained. Great open
meetings were held every Sunday evening in the recital hall of
the then new auditorium, presided over by such representative
citizens as Lyman Gage, and every possible shade of opinion was
freely expressed. A man who spoke constantly at these meetings
used to be pointed out to the visiting stranger as one who had
been involved with the group of convicted anarchists, and who
doubtless would have been arrested and tried, but for the
accident of his having been in Milwaukee when the explosion
occurred. One cannot imagine such meetings being held in Chicago
to-day, nor that such a man should be encouraged to raise his
voice in a public assemblage presided over by a leading banker.
It is hard to tell just what change has come over our philosophy
or over the minds of those citizens who were then convinced that
if these conferences had been established earlier, the Haymarket
riot and all its sensational results might have been avoided.
At any rate, there seemed a further need for smaller clubs, where
men who differed widely in their social theories might meet for
discussion, where representatives of the various economic schools
might modify each other, and at least learn tolerance and the
futility of endeavoring to convince all the world of the truth of
one position. Fanaticism is engendered only when men, finding no
contradiction to their theories, at last believe that the very
universe lends itself as an exemplification of one point of view.
"The Working People's Social Science Club" was organized at
Hull-House in the spring of 1890 by an English workingman, and
for seven years it held a weekly meeting. At eight o'clock every
Wednesday night the secretary called to order from forty to one
hundred people; a chairman for the evening was elected, a speaker
was introduced who was allowed to talk until nine o'clock; his
subject was then thrown open to discussion and a lively debate
ensued until ten o'clock, at which hour the meeting was declared
adjourned. The enthusiasm of this club seldom lagged. Its zest
for discussion was unceasing, and any attempt to turn it into a
study or reading club always met with the strong disapprobation
of the members.
In these weekly discussions in the Hull-House drawing room
everything was thrown back upon general principles and all
discussion save that which "went to the root of things," was
impatiently discarded as an unworthy, halfway measure. I recall
one evening in this club when an exasperated member had thrown out
the statement that "Mr. B. believes that socialism will cure the
toothache." Mr. B. promptly rose to his feet and said that it
certainly would, that when every child's teeth were systematically
cared for from the beginning, toothaches would disappear from the
face of the earth, belonging, as it did, to the extinct
competitive order, as the black plague had disappeared from the
earth with the ill-regulated feudal regime of the Middle Ages.
"But," he added, "why do we spend time discussing trifles like the
toothache when great social changes are to be considered which
will of themselves reform these minor ills?" Even the man who had
been humorous fell into the solemn tone of the gathering. It was,
perhaps, here that the socialist surpassed everyone else in the
fervor of economic discussion. He was usually a German or a
Russian, with a turn for logical presentation, who saw in the
concentration of capital and the growth of monopolies an
inevitable transition to the socialist state. He pointed out that
the concentration of capital in fewer hands but increased the mass
of those whose interests were opposed to a maintenance of its
power, and vastly simplified its final absorption by the
community; that monopoly "when it is finished doth bring forth
socialism." Opposite to him, springing up in every discussion was
the individualist, or, as the socialist called him, the anarchist,
who insisted that we shall never secure just human relations until
we have equality of opportunity; that the sole function of the
state is to maintain the freedom of each, guarded by the like
freedom of all, in order that each man may be able to work out the
problems of his own existence.
That first winter was within three years of the Henry George
campaign in New York, when his adherents all over the country
were carrying on a successful and effective propaganda. When
Henry George himself came to Hull-House one Sunday afternoon, the
gymnasium which was already crowded with men to hear Father
Huntington's address on "Why should a free thinker believe in
Christ," fairly rocked on its foundations under the enthusiastic
and prolonged applause which greeted this great leader and
constantly interrupted his stirring address, filled, as all of
his speeches were, with high moral enthusiasm and humanitarian
fervor. Of the remarkable congresses held in connection with the
World's Fair, perhaps those inaugurated by the advocates of
single tax exceeded all others in vital enthusiasm. It was
possibly significant that all discussions in the department of
social science had to be organized by partisans in separate
groups. The very committee itself on social science composed of
Chicago citizens, of whom I was one, changed from week to week,
as partisan members had their feelings hurt because their cause
did not receive "due recognition." And yet in the same building
adherents of the most diverse religious creeds, eastern and
western, met in amity and good fellowship. Did it perhaps
indicate that their presentation of the eternal problems of life
were cast in an older and less sensitive mold than this
presentation in terms of social experience, or was it rather that
the new social science was not yet a science at all but merely a
name under cover of which we might discuss the perplexing
problems of the industrial situation? Certainly the difficulties
of our committee were not minimized by the fact that the then new
science of sociology had not yet defined its own field. The
University of Chicago, opened only the year before the World's
Fair, was the first great institution of learning to institute a
department of sociology.
In the meantime the Hull-House Social Science Club grew in
numbers and fervor as various distinguished people who were
visiting the World's Fair came to address it. I recall a
brilliant Frenchwoman who was filled with amazement because one
of the shabbiest men reflected a reading of Schopenhauer. She
considered the statement of another member most remarkable--that
when he saw a carriage driving through the streets occupied by a
capitalist who was no longer even an entrepreneur, he felt quite
as sure that his days were numbered and that his very lack of
function to society would speedily bring him to extinction, as he
did when he saw a drunkard reeling along the same street.
The club at any rate convinced the residents that no one so
poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the
man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with
those failures and has suffered most. I recall the shrewd
comments of a certain sailor who had known the disinherited in
every country; of a Russian who had served his term in Siberia;
of an old Irishman who called himself an atheist but who in
moments of excitement always blamed the good Lord for "setting
supinely" when the world was so horribly out of joint.
It was doubtless owing largely to this club that Hull-House
contracted its early reputation for radicalism. Visitors refused
to distinguish between the sentiments expressed by its members in
the heat of discussion and the opinions held by the residents
themselves. At that moment in Chicago the radical of every shade
of opinion was vigorous and dogmatic; of the sort that could not
resign himself to the slow march of human improvement; of the
type who knew exactly "in what part of the world Utopia standeth."
During this decade Chicago seemed divided into two classes; those
who held that "business is business" and who were therefore
annoyed at the very notion of social control, and the radicals,
who claimed that nothing could be done to really moralize the
industrial situation until society should be reorganized.
A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which
those who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and
opportunities are early attracted. It is this type of mind which
is in itself so often obnoxious to the man of conquering business
faculty, to whom the practical world of affairs seems so supremely
rational that he would never vote to change the type of it even if
he could. The man of social enthusiasm is to him an annoyance and
an affront. He does not like to hear him talk and considers him
per se "unsafe." Such a business man would admit, as an abstract
proposition, that society is susceptible of modification and would
even agree that all human institutions imply progressive
development, but at the same time he deeply distrusts those who
seek to reform existing conditions. There is a certain
common-sense foundation for this distrust, for too often the
reformer is the rebel who defies things as they are, because of
the restraints which they impose upon his individual desires
rather than because of the general defects of the system. When
such a rebel poses for a reformer, his shortcomings are heralded
to the world, and his downfall is cherished as an awful warning to
those who refuse to worship "the god of things as they are."
And yet as I recall the members of this early club, even those
who talked the most and the least rationally, seem to me to have
been particularly kindly and "safe." The most pronounced
anarchist among them has long since become a convert to a
religious sect, holding Buddhistic tenets which imply little food
and a distrust of all action; he has become a wraith of his
former self but he still retains his kindly smile.
In the discussion of these themes, Hull-House was of course quite
as much under the suspicion of one side as the other. I remember
one night when I addressed a club of secularists, which met at the
corner of South Halsted and Madison streets, a rough-looking man
called out: "You are all right now, but, mark my words, when you
are subsidized by the millionaires, you will be afraid to talk like
this." The defense of free speech was a sensitive point with me,
and I quickly replied that while I did not intend to be subsidized
by millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by workingmen,
and that I should state my honest opinion without consulting either
of them. To my surprise, the audience of radicals broke into
applause, and the discussion turned upon the need of resisting
tyranny wherever found, if democratic institutions were to endure.
This desire to bear independent witness to social righteousness
often resulted in a sense of compromise difficult to endure, and at
many times it seemed to me that we were destined to alienate
everybody. I should have been most grateful at that time to accept
the tenets of socialism, and I conscientiously made my effort, both
by reading and by many discussions with the comrades. I found that
I could easily give an affirmative answer to the heated question
"Don't you see that just as the hand mill created a society with a
feudal lord, so the steam mill creates a society with an industrial
capitalist?" But it was a little harder to give an affirmative
reply to the proposition that the social relation thus established
proceeds to create principles, ideas and categories as merely
historical and transitory products.
Of course I use the term "socialism" technically and do not wish
to confuse it with the growing sensitiveness which recognizes
that no personal comfort, nor individual development can
compensate a man for the misery of his neighbors, nor with the
increasing conviction that social arrangements can be transformed
through man's conscious and deliberate effort. Such a definition
would not have been accepted for a moment by the Russians, who
then dominated the socialist party in Chicago and among whom a
crude interpretation of the class conflict was the test of faith.
During those first years on Halsted Street nothing was more
painfully clear than the fact that pliable human nature is
relentlessly pressed upon by its physical environment. I saw
nowhere a more devoted effort to understand and relieve that
heavy pressure than the socialists were making, and I should have
been glad to have had the comradeship of that gallant company had
they not firmly insisted that fellowship depends upon identity of
creed. They repudiated similarity of aim and social sympathy as
tests which were much too loose and wavering as they did that
vague socialism which for thousands has come to be a philosophy
or rather religion embodying the hope of the world and the
protection of all who suffer.
I also longed for the comfort of a definite social creed, which
should afford at one and the same time an explanation of the
social chaos and the logical steps towards its better ordering. I
came to have an exaggerated sense of responsibility for the
poverty in the midst of which I was living and which the
socialists constantly forced me to defend. My plight was not
unlike that which might have resulted in my old days of
skepticism regarding foreordination, had I then been compelled to
defend the confusion arising from the clashing of free wills as
an alternative to an acceptance of the doctrine. Another
difficulty in the way of accepting this economic determinism, so
baldly dependent upon the theory of class consciousness,
constantly arose when I lectured in country towns and there had
opportunities to read human documents of prosperous people as
well as those of my neighbors who were crowded into the city. The
former were stoutly unconscious of any classes in America, and
the class consciousness of the immigrants was fast being broken
into by the necessity for making new and unprecedented
connections in the industrial life all about them.
In the meantime, although many men of many minds met constantly
at our conferences, it was amazing to find the incorrigible good
nature which prevailed. Radicals are accustomed to hot
discussion and sharp differences of opinion and take it all in
the day's work. I recall that the secretary of the Hull-House
Social Science Club at the anniversary of the seventh year of its
existence read a report in which he stated that, so far as he
could remember, but twice during that time had a speaker lost his
temper, and in each case it had been a college professor who
"wasn't accustomed to being talked back to."
He also added that but once had all the club members united in
applauding the same speaker; only Samuel Jones, who afterwards
became the "golden rule" mayor of Toledo, had been able to
overcome all their dogmatic differences, when he had set forth a
plan of endowing a group of workingmen with a factory plant and a
working capital for experimentation in hours and wages, quite as
groups of scholars are endowed for research.
Chicago continued to devote much time to economic discussion and
remained in a state of youthful glamour throughout the nineties.
I recall a young Methodist minister who, in order to free his
denomination from any entanglement in his discussion of the
economic and social situation, moved from his church building
into a neighboring hall. The congregation and many other people
followed him there, and he later took to the street corners
because he found that the shabbiest men liked that best.
Professor Herron filled to overflowing a downtown hall every noon
with a series of talks entitled "Between Caesar and Jesus"--an
attempt to apply the teachings of the Gospel to the situations of
modern commerce. A half dozen publications edited with some
ability and much moral enthusiasm have passed away, perhaps
because they represented pamphleteering rather than journalism
and came to a natural end when the situation changed. Certainly
their editors suffered criticism and poverty on behalf of the
causes which they represented.
Trades-unionists, unless they were also socialists, were not
prominent in those economic discussions, although they were
steadily making an effort to bring order into the unnecessary
industrial confusion. They belonged to the second of the two
classes into which Mill divides all those who are dissatisfied
with human life as it is, and whose feelings are wholly identified
with its radical amendment. He states that the thoughts of one
class are in the region of ultimate aims, of "the highest ideals
of human life," while the thoughts of the other are in the region
of the "immediately useful, and practically attainable."
The meetings of our Social Science Club were carried on by men of
the former class, many of them with a strong religious bias who
constantly challenged the Church to assuage the human spirit thus
torn and bruised "in the tumult of a time disconsolate." These
men were so serious in their demand for religious fellowship, and
several young clergymen were so ready to respond to the appeal,
that various meetings were arranged at Hull-House, in which a
group of people met together to consider the social question, not
in a spirit of discussion, but in prayer and meditation. These
clergymen were making heroic efforts to induce their churches to
formally consider the labor situation, and during the years which
have elapsed since then, many denominations of the Christian
Church have organized labor committees; but at that time there
was nothing of the sort beyond the society in the established
Church of England "to consider the conditions of labor."
During that decade even the most devoted of that pioneer church
society failed to formulate the fervid desire for juster social
conditions into anything more convincing than a literary statement,
and the Christian Socialists, at least when the American branch
held its annual meeting at Hull-House, afforded but a striking
portrayal of that "between-age mood" in which so many of our
religious contemporaries are forced to live. I remember that I
received the same impression when I attended a meeting called by
the canon of an English cathedral to discuss the relation of the
Church to labor. The men quickly indicted the cathedral for its
uselessness, and the canon asked them what in their minds should be
its future. The men promptly replied that any new social order
would wish, of course, to preserve beautiful historic buildings,
that although they would dismiss the bishop and all the clergy,
they would want to retain one or two scholars as custodians and
interpreters. "And what next?" the imperturbable ecclesiastic
asked. "We would democratize it," replied the men. But when it
came to a more detailed description of such an undertaking, the
discussion broke down into a dozen bits, although illuminated by
much shrewd wisdom and affording a clue, perhaps as to the
destruction of the bishop's palace by the citizens of this same
town, who had attacked it as a symbol of swollen prosperity during
the bread riots of the earlier part of the century.
On the other hand the workingmen who continue to demand help from
the Church thereby acknowledge their kinship, as does the son who
continues to ask bread from the father who gives him a stone. I
recall an incident connected with a prolonged strike in Chicago
on the part of the typographical unions for an eight-hour day.
The strike had been conducted in a most orderly manner and the
union men, convinced of the justice of their cause, had felt
aggrieved because one of the religious publishing houses in
Chicago had constantly opposed them. Some of the younger
clergymen of the denominations who were friendly to the strikers'
cause came to a luncheon at Hull-House, where the situation was
discussed by the representatives of all sides. The clergymen,
becoming much interested in the idealism with which an officer of
the State Federation of Labor presented the cause, drew from him
the story of his search for fraternal relation: he said that at
fourteen years of age he had joined a church, hoping to find it
there; he had later become a member of many fraternal
organizations and mutual benefit societies, and, although much
impressed by their rituals, he was disappointed in the actual
fraternity. He had finally found, so it seemed to him, in the
cause of organized labor, what these other organizations had
failed to give him--an opportunity for sacrificial effort.
Chicago thus took a decade to discuss the problems inherent in
the present industrial organization and to consider what might be
done, not so much against deliberate aggression as against brutal
confusion and neglect; quite as the youth of promise passed
through a mist of rose-colored hope before he settles in the land
of achievement where he becomes all too dull and literal minded.
And yet as I hastily review the decade in Chicago which followed
this one given over to discussion, the actual attainment of these
early hopes, so far as they have been realized at all, seem to
have come from men of affairs rather than from those given to
speculation. Was the whole decade of discussion an illustration
of that striking fact which has been likened to the changing of
swords in Hamlet; that the abstract minds at length yield to the
inevitable or at least grow less ardent in their propaganda,
while the concrete minds, dealing constantly with daily affairs,
in the end demonstrate the reality of abstract notions?
I remember when Frederick Harrison visited Hull-House that I was
much disappointed to find that the Positivists had not made their
ardor for humanity a more potent factor in the English social
movement, as I was surprised during a visit from John Morley to
find that he, representing perhaps the type of man whom political
life seemed to have pulled away from the ideals of his youth, had
yet been such a champion of democracy in the full tide of
reaction. My observations were much too superficial to be of
value and certainly both men were well grounded in philosophy and
theory of social reform and had long before carefully formulated
their principles, as the new English Labor Party, which is
destined to break up the reactionary period, is now being created
by another set of theorists. There were certainly moments during
the heated discussions of this decade when nothing seemed so
important as right theory: this was borne in upon me one brilliant
evening at Hull-House when Benjamin Kidd, author of the much-read
"Social Evolution," was pitted against Victor Berger of Milwaukee,
even then considered a rising man in the Socialist Party.
At any rate the residents of Hull-House discovered that while
their first impact with city poverty allied them to groups given
over to discussion of social theories , their sober efforts to
heal neighborhood ills allied them to general public movements
which were without challenging creeds. But while we discovered
that we most easily secured the smallest of much-needed
improvements by attaching our efforts to those of organized
bodies, nevertheless these very organizations would have been
impossible, had not the public conscience been aroused and the
community sensibility quickened by these same ardent theorists.
As I review these very first impressions of the workers in
unskilled industries, living in a depressed quarter of the city,
I realize how easy it was for us to see exceptional cases of
hardship as typical of the average lot, and yet, in spite of
alleviating philanthropy and labor legislation, the indictment of
Tolstoy applied to Moscow thirty years ago still fits every
American city: "Wherever we may live, if we draw a circle around
us of a hundred thousand, or a thousand, or even of ten miles
circumference, and look at the lives of those men and women who
are inside our circle, we shall find half-starved children, old
people, pregnant women, sick and weak persons, working beyond
their strength, who have neither food nor rest enough to support
them, and who, for this reason, die before their time; we shall
see others, full grown, who are injured and needlessly killed by
dangerous and hurtful tasks."
As the American city is awakening to self-consciousness, it
slowly perceives the civic significance of these industrial
conditions, and perhaps Chicago has been foremost in the effort
to connect the unregulated overgrowth of the huge centers of
population, with the astonishingly rapid development of
industrial enterprises; quite as Chicago was foremost to carry on
the preliminary discussion through which a basis was laid for
likemindedness and the coordination of diverse wills. I remember
an astute English visitor, who had been a guest in a score of
American cities, observed that it was hard to understand the
local pride he constantly encountered; for in spite of the
boasting on the part of leading citizens in the western, eastern,
and southern towns, all American cities seemed to him essentially
alike and all equally the results of an industry totally
unregulated by well-considered legislation.
I am inclined to think that perhaps all this general discussion
was inevitable in connection with the early Settlements, as they
in turn were the inevitable result of theories of social reform,
which in their full enthusiasm reached America by way of England,
only in the last decade of the century. There must have been
tough fiber somewhere; for, although the residents of Hull-House
were often baffled by the radicalism within the Social Science
Club and harassed by the criticism from outside, we still
continued to believe that such discussion should be carried on,
for if the Settlement seeks its expression through social
activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest
and spiritual impulse.
The group of Hull-House residents, which by the end of the decade
comprised twenty-five, differed widely in social beliefs, from the
girl direct from the country who looked upon all social unrest as
mere anarchy, to the resident, who had become a socialist when a
student in Zurich, and who had long before translated from the
German Engel's "Conditions of the Working Class in England,"
although at this time she had been read out of the Socialist Party
because the Russian and German Impossibilists suspected her fluent
English, as she always lightly explained. Although thus diversified
in social beliefs, the residents became solidly united through our
mutual experience in an industrial quarter, and we became not only
convinced of the need for social control and protective legislation
but also of the value of this preliminary argument.
This decade of discussion between 1890 and 1900 already seems
remote from the spirit of Chicago of to-day. So far as I have been
able to reproduce this earlier period, it must reflect the
essential provisionality of everything; "the perpetual moving on to
something future which shall supersede the present," that paramount
impression of life itself, which affords us at one and the same
time, ground for despair and for endless and varied anticipation.
[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 ofWomen Writers]
"Chapter X: Pioneer Labor Legislation in Illinois 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.
198-230.
[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]