PIONEER LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS
Our very first Christmas at Hull-House, when we as yet knew
nothing of child labor, a number of little girls refused the
candy which was offered them as part of the Christmas good cheer,
saying simply that they "worked in a candy factory and could not
bear the sight of it." We discovered that for six weeks they had
worked from seven in the morning until nine at night, and they
were exhausted as well as satiated. The sharp consciousness of
stern economic conditions was thus thrust upon us in the midst of
the season of good will.
During the same winter three boys from a Hull-House club were
injured at one machine in a neighboring factory for lack of a
guard which would have cost but a few dollars. When the injury of
one of these boys resulted in his death, we felt quite sure that
the owners of the factory would share our horror and remorse, and
that they would do everything possible to prevent the recurrence
of such a tragedy. To our surprise they did nothing whatever, and
I made my first acquaintance then with those pathetic documents
signed by the parents of working children, that they will make no
claim for damages resulting from "carelessness."
The visits we made in the neighborhood constantly discovered
women sewing upon sweatshop work, and often they were assisted by
incredibly small children. I remember a little girl of four who
pulled out basting threads hour after hour, sitting on a stool at
the feet of her Bohemian mother, a little bunch of human misery.
But even for that there was no legal redress, for the only
child-labor law in Illinois, with any provision for enforcement,
had been secured by the coal miners' unions, and was confined to
children employed in mines.
We learned to know many families in which the working children
contributed to the support of their parents, not only because
they spoke English better than the older immigrants and were
willing to take lower wages, but because their parents gradually
found it easy to live upon their earnings. A South Italian
peasant who has picked olives and packed oranges from his
toddling babyhood cannot see at once the difference between the
outdoor healthy work which he had performed in the varying
seasons, and the long hours of monotonous factory life which his
child encounters when he goes to work in Chicago. An Italian
father came to us in great grief over the death of his eldest
child, a little girl of twelve, who had brought the largest wages
into the family fund. In the midst of his genuine sorrow he
said: "She was the oldest kid I had. Now I shall have to go back
to work again until the next one is able to take care of me." The
man was only thirty-three and had hoped to retire from work at
least during the winters. No foreman cared to have him in a
factory, untrained and unintelligent as he was. It was much
easier for his bright, English-speaking little girl to get a
chance to paste labels on a box than for him to secure an
opportunity to carry pig iron. The effect on the child was what
no one concerned thought about, in the abnormal effort she made
thus prematurely to bear the weight of life. Another little girl
of thirteen, a Russian-Jewish child employed in a laundry at a
heavy task beyond her strength, committed suicide, because she
had borrowed three dollars from a companion which she could not
repay unless she confided the story to her parents and gave up an
entire week's wages--but what could the family live upon that
week in case she did! Her child mind, of course, had no sense of
proportion, and carbolic acid appeared inevitable.
While we found many pathetic cases of child labor and hard-driven
victims of the sweating system who could not possibly earn enough
in the short busy season to support themselves during the rest of
the year, it became evident that we must add carefully collected
information to our general impression of neighborhood conditions
if we would make it of any genuine value.
There was at that time no statistical information on Chicago
industrial conditions, and Mrs. Florence Kelley, an early
resident of Hull-House, suggested to the Illinois State Bureau of
Labor that they investigate the sweating system in Chicago with
its attendant child labor. The head of the Bureau adopted this
suggestion and engaged Mrs. Kelley to make the investigation.
When the report was presented to the Illinois Legislature, a
special committee was appointed to look into the Chicago
conditions. I well recall that on the Sunday the members of this
commission came to dine at Hull-House, our hopes ran high, and we
believed that at last some of the worst ills under which our
neighbors were suffering would be brought to an end.
As a result of its investigations, this committee recommended to
the Legislature the provisions which afterward became those of the
first factory law of Illinois, regulating the sanitary conditions
of the sweatshop and fixing fourteen as the age at which a child
might be employed. Before the passage of the law could be
secured, it was necessary to appeal to all elements of the
community, and a little group of us addressed the open meetings of
trades-unions and of benefit societies, church organizations, and
social clubs literally every evening for three months. Of course
the most energetic help as well as intelligent understanding came
from the trades-unions. The central labor body of Chicago, then
called the Trades and Labor Assembly, had previously appointed a
committee of investigation to inquire into the sweating system.
This committee consisted of five delegates from the unions and
five outside their membership. Two of the latter were residents of
Hull-House, and continued with the unions in their well-conducted
campaign until the passage of Illinois's first Factory Legislation
was secured, a statute which has gradually been built upon by many
public-spirited citizens until Illinois stands well among the
States, at least in the matter of protecting her children. The
Hull-House residents that winter had their first experience in
lobbying. I remember that I very much disliked the word and still
more the prospect of the lobbying itself, and we insisted that
well-known Chicago women should accompany this first little group
of Settlement folk who with trades-unionists moved upon the state
capitol in behalf of factory legislation. The national or, to use
its formal name, The General Federation of Woman's Clubs had been
organized in Chicago only the year before this legislation was
secured. The Federation was then timid in regard to all
legislation because it was anxious not to frighten its new
membership, although its second president, Mrs. Henrotin, was most
untiring in her efforts to secure this law.
It was, perhaps, a premature effort, though certainly founded
upon a genuine need, to urge that a clause limiting the hours of
all women working in factories or workshops to eight a day, or
forty-eight a week, should be inserted in the first factory
legislation of the State. Although we had lived at Hull-House
but three years when we urged this legislation, we had known a
large number of young girls who were constantly exhausted by
night work; for whatever may be said in defense of night work for
men, few women are able to endure it. A man who works by night
sleeps regularly by day, but a woman finds it impossible to put
aside the household duties which crowd upon her, and a
conscientious girl finds it hard to sleep with her mother washing
and scrubbing within a few feet of her bed. One of the most
painful impressions of those first years is that of pale,
listless girls, who worked regularly in a factory of the vicinity
which was then running full night time. These girls also
encountered a special danger in the early morning hours as they
returned from work, debilitated and exhausted, and only too
easily convinced that a drink and a little dancing at the end of
the balls in the saloon dance halls, was what they needed to
brace them. One of the girls whom we then knew, whose name,
Chloe, seemed to fit her delicate charm, craving a drink to
dispel her lassitude before her tired feet should take the long
walk home, had thus been decoyed into a saloon, where the soft
drink was followed by an alcoholic one containing "knockout
drops," and she awoke in a disreputable rooming house--too
frightened and disgraced to return to her mother.
Thus confronted by that old conundrum of the interdependence of
matter and spirit, the conviction was forced upon us that long and
exhausting hours of work are almost sure to be followed by lurid
and exciting pleasures; that the power to overcome temptation
reaches its limit almost automatically with that of physical
resistance. The eight-hour clause in this first factory law met
with much less opposition in the Legislature than was anticipated,
and was enforced for a year before it was pronounced
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Illinois. During the
halcyon months when it was a law, a large and enthusiastic
Eight-Hour Club of working women met at Hull-House, to read the
literature on the subject and in every way to prepare themselves
to make public sentiment in favor of the measure which meant so
much to them. The adverse decision in the test case, the progress
of which they had most intelligently followed, was a matter of
great disappointment. The entire experience left on my mind a
mistrust of all legislation which was not preceded by full
discussion and understanding. A premature measure may be carried
through a legislature by perfectly legitimate means and still fail
to possess vitality and a sense of maturity. On the other hand,
the administration of an advanced law acts somewhat as a
referendum. The people have an opportunity for two years to see
the effects of its operation. If they choose to reopen the matter
at the next General Assembly, it can be discussed with experience
and conviction; the very operation of the law has performed the
function of the "referendum" in a limited use of the term.
Founded upon some such compunction, the sense that the passage of
the child labor law would in many cases work hardship, was never
absent from my mind during the earliest years of its operation. I
addressed as many mothers' meetings and clubs among working women
as I could, in order to make clear the object of the law and the
ultimate benefit to themselves as well as to their children. I
am happy to remember that I never met with lack of understanding
among the hard-working widows, in whose behalf many prosperous
people were so eloquent. These widowed mothers would say, "Why,
of course, that is what I am working for--to give the children a
chance. I want them to have more education than I had"; or
another, "That is why we came to America, and I don't want to
spoil his start, even although his father is dead"; or "It's
different in America. A boy gets left if he isn't educated."
There was always a willingness, even among the poorest women, to
keep on with the hard night scrubbing or the long days of washing
for the children's sake.
The bitterest opposition to the law came from the large glass
companies, who were so accustomed to use the labor of children
that they were convinced the manufacturing of glass could not be
carried on without it.
Fifteen years ago the State of Illinois, as well as Chicago,
exhibited many characteristics of the pioneer country in which
untrammeled energy and an "early start" were still the most
highly prized generators of success. Although this first labor
legislation was but bringing Illinois into line with the nations
in the modern industrial world, which "have long been obliged for
their own sakes to come to the aid of the workers by which they
live--that the child, the young person and the woman may be
protected from their own weakness and necessity?" nevertheless
from the first it ran counter to the instinct and tradition,
almost to the very religion of the manufacturers of the state,
who were for the most part self-made men.
This first attempt in Illinois for adequate factory legislation
also was associated in the minds of businessmen with radicalism,
because the law was secured during the term of Governor Altgeld
and was first enforced during his administration. While nothing
in its genesis or spirit could be further from "anarchy" than
factory legislation, and while the first law in Illinois was still
far behind Massachusetts and New York, the fact that Governor
Altgeld pardoned from the state's prison the anarchists who had
been sentenced there after the Haymarket riot, gave the opponents
of this most reasonable legislation a quickly utilized opportunity
to couple it with that detested word; the State document which
accompanied Governor Altgeld's pardon gave these ungenerous
critics a further opportunity, because a magnanimous action was
marred by personal rancor, betraying for the moment the infirmity
of a noble mind. For all of these reasons this first modification
of the undisturbed control of the aggressive captains of industry
could not be enforced without resistance marked by dramatic
episodes and revolts. The inception of the law had already become
associated with Hull-House, and when its ministration was also
centered there, we inevitably received all the odium which these
first efforts entailed. Mrs. Kelley was appointed the first
factory inspector with a deputy and a force of twelve inspectors
to enforce the law. Both Mrs. Kelley and her assistant, Mrs.
Stevens, lived at Hull-House; the office was on Polk Street
directly opposite, and one of the most vigorous deputies was the
president of the Jane Club. In addition, one of the early men
residents, since dean of a state law school, acted as prosecutor
in the cases brought against the violators of the law.
Chicago had for years been notoriously lax in the administration
of law, and the enforcement of an unpopular measure was resented
equally by the president of a large manufacturing concern and by
the former victim of a sweatshop who had started a place of his
own. Whatever the sentiments toward the new law on the part of
the employers, there was no doubt of its enthusiastic reception
by the trades-unions, as the securing of the law had already come
from them, and through the years which have elapsed since, the
experience of the Hull-House residents would coincide with that
of an English statesman who said that "a common rule for the
standard of life and the condition of labor may be secured by
legislation, but it must be maintained by trades unionism."
This special value of the trades-unions first became clear to the
residents of Hull-House in connection with the sweating system.
We early found that the women in the sewing trades were sorely in
need of help. The trade was thoroughly disorganized, Russian and
Polish tailors competing against English-speaking tailors,
unskilled Bohemian and Italian women competing against both.
These women seem to have been best helped through the use of the
label when unions of specialized workers in the trade are strong
enough to insist that the manufacturers shall "give out work"
only to those holding union cards. It was certainly impressive
when the garment makers themselves in this way finally succeeded
in organizing six hundred of the Italian women in our immediate
vicinity, who had finished garments at home for the most wretched
and precarious wages. To be sure, the most ignorant women only
knew that "you couldn't get clothes to sew" from the places where
they paid the best, unless "you had a card," but through the
veins of most of them there pulsed the quickened blood of a new
fellowship, a sense of comfort and aid which had been laid out to
them by their fellow-workers.
During the fourth year of our residence at Hull-House we found
ourselves in a large mass meeting ardently advocating the passage
of a Federal measure called the Sulzer Bill. Even in our short
struggle with the evils of the sweating system it did not seem
strange that the center of the effort had shifted to Washington,
for by that time we had realized that the sanitary regulation of
sweatshops by city officials, and a careful enforcement of factory
legislation by state factory inspectors will not avail, unless
each city and State shall be able to pass and enforce a code of
comparatively uniform legislation. Although the Sulzer Act failed
to utilize the Interstate Commerce legislation for its purpose,
many of the national representatives realized for the first time
that only by federal legislation could their constituents in
remote country places be protected from contagious diseases raging
in New York or Chicago, for many country doctors testify as to the
outbreak of scarlet fever in rural neighborhoods after the
children have begun to wear the winter overcoats and cloaks which
have been sent from infected city sweatshops.
Through our efforts to modify the sweating system, the Hull-House
residents gradually became committed to the fortunes of the
Consumers' League, an organization which for years has been
approaching the question of the underpaid sewing woman from the
point of view of the ultimate responsibility lodged in the
consumer. It becomes more reasonable to make the presentation of
the sweatshop situation through this League, as it is more
effectual to work with them for the extension of legal provisions
in the slow upbuilding of that code of legislation which is alone
sufficient to protect the home from the dangers incident to the
sweating system.
The Consumers' League seems to afford the best method of approach
for the protection of girls in department stores; I recall a
group of girls from a neighboring "emporium" who applied to
Hull-House for dancing parties on alternate Sunday afternoons.
In reply to our protest they told us they not only worked late
every evening, in spite of the fact that each was supposed to
have "two nights a week off," and every Sunday morning, but that
on alternate Sunday afternoons they were required "to sort the
stock." Over and over again, meetings called by the Clerks Union
and others have been held at Hull-House protesting against these
incredibly long hours. Little modification has come about,
however, during our twenty years of residence, although one large
store in the Bohemian quarter closes all day on Sunday and many
of the others for three nights a week. In spite of the Sunday
work, these girls prefer the outlying department stores to those
downtown; there is more social intercourse with the customers,
more kindliness and social equality between the saleswomen and
the managers, and above all the girls have the protection
naturally afforded by friends and neighbors and they are free
from that suspicion which so often haunts the girls downtown,
that their fellow workers may not be "nice girls."
In the first years of Hull-House we came across no trades-unions
among the women workers, and I think, perhaps, that only one
union, composed solely of women, was to be found in Chicago
then--that of the bookbinders. I easily recall the evening when
the president of this pioneer organization accepted an invitation
to take dinner at Hull-House. She came in rather a recalcitrant
mood, expecting to be patronized, and so suspicious of our
motives that it was only after she had been persuaded to become a
guest of the house for several weeks in order to find out about
us for herself, that she was convinced of our sincerity and of
the ability of "outsiders" to be of any service to working women.
She afterward became closely identified with Hull-House, and her
hearty cooperation was assured until she moved to Boston and
became a general organizer for the American Federation of Labor.
The women shirt makers and the women cloak makers were both
organized at Hull-House as was also the Dorcas Federal Labor
Union, which had been founded through the efforts of a working
woman, then one of the residents. The latter union met once a
month in our drawing room. It was composed of representatives
from all the unions in the city which included women in their
membership and also received other women in sympathy with
unionism. It was accorded representation in the central labor
body of the city, and later it joined its efforts with those of
others to found the Woman's Union Label League. In what we
considered a praiseworthy effort to unite it with other
organizations, the president of a leading Woman's Club applied
for membership. We were so sure of her election that she stood
just outside of the drawing-room door, or, in trades-union
language, "the wicket gate," while her name was voted upon. To
our chagrin, she did not receive enough votes to secure her
admission, not because the working girls, as they were careful to
state, did not admire her, but because she "seemed to belong to
the other side." Fortunately, the big-minded woman so thoroughly
understood the vote and her interest in working women was so
genuine that it was less than a decade afterward when she was
elected to the presidency of the National Woman's Trades Union
League. The incident and the sequel registers, perhaps, the
change in Chicago toward the labor movement, the recognition of
the fact that it is a general social movement concerning all
members of society and not merely a class struggle.
Some such public estimate of the labor movement was brought home
to Chicago during several conspicuous strikes; at least labor
legislation has twice been inaugurated because its need was thus
made clear. After the Pullman strike various elements in the
community were unexpectedly brought together that they might
soberly consider and rectify the weakness in the legal structure
which the strike had revealed. These citizens arranged for a
large and representative convention to be held in Chicago on
Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration. I served as secretary
of the committee from the new Civic Federation having the matter
in charge, and our hopes ran high when, as a result of the
agitation, the Illinois legislature passed a law creating a State
Board of Conciliation and Arbitration. But even a state board
cannot accomplish more than public sentiment authorizes and
sustains, and we might easily have been discouraged in those
early days could we have foreseen some of the industrial
disturbances which have since disgraced Chicago. This law
embodied the best provisions of the then existing laws for the
arbitration of industrial disputes. At the time the word
arbitration was still a word to conjure with, and many Chicago
citizens were convinced, not only of the danger and futility
involved in the open warfare of opposing social forces, but
further believed that the search for justice and righteousness in
industrial relations was made infinitely more difficult thereby.
The Pullman strike afforded much illumination to many Chicago
people. Before it, there had been nothing in my experience to
reveal that distinct cleavage of society, which a general strike
at least momentarily affords. Certainly, during all those dark
days of the Pullman strike, the growth of class bitterness was
most obvious. The fact that the Settlement maintained avenues of
intercourse with both sides seemed to give it opportunity for
nothing but a realization of the bitterness and division along
class lines. I had known Mr. Pullman and had seen his genuine
pride and pleasure in the model town he had built with so much
care; and I had an opportunity to talk to many of the Pullman
employees during the strike when I was sent from a so-called
"Citizens' Arbitration Committee" to their first meetings held in
a hall in the neighboring village of Kensington, and when I was
invited to the modest supper tables laid in the model houses.
The employees then expected a speedy settlement and no one
doubted but that all the grievances connected with the "straw
bosses" would be quickly remedied and that the benevolence which
had built the model town would not fail them. They were sure
that the "straw bosses" had misrepresented the state of affairs,
for this very first awakening to class consciousness bore many
traces of the servility on one side and the arrogance on the
other which had so long prevailed in the model town. The entire
strike demonstrated how often the outcome of far-reaching
industrial disturbances is dependent upon the personal will of
the employer or the temperament of a strike leader. Those
familiar with strikes know only too well how much they are
influenced by poignant domestic situations, by the troubled
consciences of the minority directors, by the suffering women and
children, by the keen excitement of the struggle, by the
religious scruples sternly suppressed but occasionally asserting
themselves, now on one side and now on the other, and by that
undefined psychology of the crowd which we understand so little.
All of these factors also influence the public and do much to
determine popular sympathy and judgment. In the early days of
the Pullman strike, as I was coming down in the elevator of the
Auditorium hotel from one of the futile meetings of the
Arbitration Committee, I met an acquaintance, who angrily said
"that the strikers ought all to be shot." As I had heard nothing
so bloodthirsty as this either from the most enraged capitalist
or from the most desperate of the men, and was interested to find
the cause of such a senseless outbreak, I finally discovered that
the first ten thousand dollars which my acquaintance had ever
saved, requiring, he said, years of effort from the time he was
twelve years old until he was thirty, had been lost as the result
of a strike; he clinched his argument that he knew what he was
talking about, with the statement that "no one need expect him to
have any sympathy with strikers or with their affairs."
A very intimate and personal experience revealed, at least to
myself, my constant dread of the spreading ill will. At the
height of the sympathetic strike my oldest sister, who was
convalescing from a long illness in a hospital near Chicago,
became suddenly very much worse. While I was able to reach her
at once, every possible obstacle of a delayed and blocked
transportation system interrupted the journey of her husband and
children who were hurrying to her bedside from a distant state.
As the end drew nearer and I was obliged to reply to my sister's
constant inquiries that her family had not yet come, I was filled
with a profound apprehension lest her last hours should be
touched with resentment toward those responsible for the delay;
lest her unutterable longing should at the very end be tinged
with bitterness. She must have divined what was in my mind, for
at last she said each time after the repetition of my sad news:
"I don't blame any one, I am not judging them." My heart was
comforted and heavy at the same time; but how many more such
moments of sorrow and death were being made difficult and lonely
throughout the land, and how much would these experiences add to
the lasting bitterness, that touch of self-righteousness which
makes the spirit of forgiveness well-nigh impossible.
When I returned to Chicago from the quiet country I saw the
Federal troops encamped about the post office; almost everyone on
Halsted Street wearing a white ribbon, the emblem of the
strikers' side; the residents at Hull-House divided in opinion as
to the righteousness of this or that measure; and no one able to
secure any real information as to which side was burning the
cars. After the Pullman strike I made an attempt to analyze in a
paper which I called The Modern King Lear the inevitable revolt
of human nature against the plans Mr. Pullman had made for his
employees, the miscarriage of which appeared to him such black
ingratitude. It seemed to me unendurable not to make some effort
to gather together the social implications of the failure of this
benevolent employer and its relation to the demand for a more
democratic administration of industry. Doubtless the paper
represented a certain "excess of participation," to use a gentle
phrase of Charles Lamb's in preference to a more emphatic one
used by Mr. Pullman himself. The last picture of the Pullman
strike which I distinctly recall was three years later when one
of the strike leaders came to see me. Although out of work for
most of the time since the strike, he had been undisturbed for
six months in the repair shops of a street-car company, under an
assumed name, but he had at that moment been discovered and
dismissed. He was a superior type of English workingman, but as
he stood there, broken and discouraged, believing himself so
black-listed that his skill could never be used again, filled
with sorrow over the loss of his wife who had recently died after
an illness with distressing mental symptoms, realizing keenly the
lack of the respectable way of living he had always until now
been able to maintain, he seemed to me an epitome of the wretched
human waste such a strike implies. I fervently hoped that the
new arbitration law would prohibit in Chicago forever more such
brutal and ineffective methods of settling industrial disputes.
And yet even as early as 1896, we found the greatest difficulty
in applying the arbitration law to the garment workers' strike,
although it was finally accomplished after various mass meetings
had urged it. The cruelty and waste of the strike as an
implement for securing the most reasonable demands came to me at
another time, during the long strike of the clothing cutters.
They had protested, not only against various wrongs of their own,
but against the fact that the tailors employed by the custom
merchants were obliged to furnish their own workshops and thus
bore a burden of rent which belonged to the employer. One of the
leaders in this strike, whom I had known for several years as a
sober, industrious, and unusually intelligent man, I saw
gradually break down during the many trying weeks and at last
suffer a complete moral collapse.
He was a man of sensitive organization under the necessity, as is
every leader during a strike, to address the same body of men day
after day with an appeal sufficiently emotional to respond to
their sense of injury; to receive callers at any hour of the day
or night; to sympathize with all the distress of the strikers who
see their families daily suffering; he must do it all with the
sickening sense of the increasing privation in his own home, and
in this case with the consciousness that failure was approaching
nearer each day. This man, accustomed to the monotony of his
workbench and suddenly thrown into a new situation, showed every
sign of nervous fatigue before the final collapse came. He
disappeared after the strike and I did not see him for ten years,
but when he returned he immediately began talking about the old
grievances which he had repeated so often that he could talk of
nothing else. It was easy to recognize the same nervous symptoms
which the broken-down lecturer exhibits who has depended upon the
exploitation of his own experiences to keep himself going. One
of his stories was indeed pathetic. His employer, during the
busy season, had met him one Sunday afternoon in Lincoln Park
whither he had taken his three youngest children, one of whom had
been ill. The employer scolded him for thus wasting his time and
roughly asked why he had not taken home enough work to keep
himself busy through the day. The story was quite credible
because the residents of Hull-House have had many opportunities
to see the worker driven ruthlessly during the season and left in
idleness for long weeks afterward. We have slowly come to
realize that periodical idleness as well as the payment of wages
insufficient for maintenance of the manual worker in full
industrial and domestic efficiency, stand economically on the
same footing with the "sweated" industries, the overwork of
women, and employment of children.
But of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so
heartbreaking as unemployment, and it was inevitable that we
should see much of it in a neighborhood where low rents attracted
the poorly paid worker and many newly arrived immigrants who were
first employed in gangs upon railroad extensions and similar
undertakings. The sturdy peasants eager for work were either the
victims of the padrone who fleeced them unmercifully, both in
securing a place to work and then in supplying them with food, or
they became the mere sport of unscrupulous employment agencies.
Hull-House made an investigation both of the padrone and of the
agencies in our immediate vicinity, and the outcome confirming
what we already suspected, we eagerly threw ourselves into a
movement to procure free employment bureaus under State control
until a law authorizing such bureaus and giving the officials
intrusted with their management power to regulate private
employment agencies, passed the Illinois Legislature in 1899. The
history of these bureaus demonstrates the tendency we all have to
consider a legal enactment in itself an achievement and to grow
careless in regard to its administration and actual results; for
an investigation into the situation ten years later discovered
that immigrants were still shamefully imposed upon. A group of
Bulgarians were found who had been sent to work in Arkansas where
their services were not needed; they walked back to Chicago only
to secure their next job in Oklahoma and to pay another railroad
fare as well as another commission to the agency. Not only was
there no method by which the men not needed in Arkansas could
know that there was work in Oklahoma unless they came back to
Chicago to find it out, but there was no certainty that they
might not be obliged to walk back from Oklahoma because the
Chicago agency had already sent out too many men.
This investigation of the employment bureau resources of Chicago
was undertaken by the League for the Protection of Immigrants,
with whom it is possible for Hull-House to cooperate whenever an
investigation of the immigrant colonies in our immediate
neighborhood seems necessary, as was recently done in regard to
the Greek colonies of Chicago. The superintendent of this
League, Miss Grace Abbott, is a resident of Hull-House and all of
our later attempts to secure justice and opportunity for
immigrants are much more effective through the League, and when
we speak before a congressional committee in Washington
concerning the needs of Chicago immigrants, we represent the
League as well as our own neighbors.
It is in connection with the first factory employment of newly
arrived immigrants and the innumerable difficulties attached to
their first adjustment that some of the most profound industrial
disturbances in Chicago have come about. Under any attempt at
classification these strikes belong more to the general social
movement than to the industrial conflict, for the strike is an
implement used most rashly by unorganized labor who, after they
are in difficulties, call upon the trades-unions for organization
and direction. They are similar to those strikes which are
inaugurated by the unions on behalf of unskilled labor. In
neither case do the hastily organized unions usually hold after
the excitement of the moment has subsided, and the most valuable
result of such strikes is the expanding consciousness of the
solidarity of the workers. This was certainly the result of the
Chicago stockyard strike in 1905, inaugurated on behalf of the
immigrant laborers and so conspicuously carried on without
violence that, although twenty-two thousand workers were idle
during the entire summer, there were fewer arrests in the
stockyards district than the average summer months afford.
However, the story of this strike should not be told from
Hull-House, but from the University of Chicago Settlement, where
Miss Mary McDowell performed such signal public service during
that trying summer. It would be interesting to trace how much of
the subsequent exposure of conditions and attempts at
governmental control of this huge industry had their genesis in
this first attempt of the unskilled workers to secure a higher
standard of living. Certainly the industrial conflict when
epitomized in a strike, centers public attention on conditions as
nothing else can do. A strike is one of the most exciting
episodes in modern life, and as it assumes the characteristics of
a game, the entire population of a city becomes divided into two
cheering sides. In such moments the fair-minded public, who
ought to be depended upon as a referee, practically disappears.
Anyone who tries to keep the attitude of nonpartisanship, which
is perhaps an impossible one, is quickly under suspicion by both
sides. At least that was the fate of a group of citizens
appointed by the mayor of Chicago to arbitrate during the stormy
teamsters' strike which occurred in 1905. We sat through a long
Sunday afternoon in the mayor's office in the City Hall, talking
first with the labor men and then with the group of capitalists.
The undertaking was the more futile in that we were all
practically the dupes of a new type of "industrial conspiracy"
successfully inaugurated in Chicago by a close compact between
the coal teamsters' union and the coal team owners' association,
who had formed a kind of monopoly hitherto new to a
monopoly-ridden public.
The stormy teamsters' strike, ostensibly undertaken in defense of
the garment workers, but really arising from causes so obscure
and dishonorable that they have never yet been made public, was
the culmination of a type of trades-unions which had developed in
Chicago during the preceding decade in which corruption had
flourished almost as openly as it had previously done in the City
Hall. This corruption sometimes took the form of grafting after
the manner of Samuel Parks in New York; sometimes that of
political deals in the "delivery of the labor vote"; and
sometimes that of a combination between capital and labor hunting
together. At various times during these years the better type of
trades-unionists had made a firm stand against this corruption
and a determined effort to eradicate it from the labor movement,
not unlike the general reform effort of many American cities
against political corruption. This reform movement in the
Chicago Federation of Labor had its martyrs, and more than one
man nearly lost his life through the "slugging" methods employed
by the powerful corruptionists. And yet even in the midst of
these things were found touching examples of fidelity to the
earlier principles of brotherhood totally untouched by the
corruption. At one time the scrubwomen in the downtown office
buildings had a union of their own affiliated with the elevator
men and the janitors. Although the union was used merely as a
weapon in the fight of the coal teamsters against the use of
natural gas in downtown buildings, it did not prevent the women
from getting their first glimpse into the fellowship and the
sense of protection which is the great gift of trades-unionism to
the unskilled, unbefriended worker. I remember in a meeting held
at Hull-House one Sunday afternoon, that the president of a
"local" of scrubwomen stood up to relate her experience. She
told first of the long years in which the fear of losing her job
and the fluctuating pay were harder to bear than the hard work
itself, when she had regarded all the other women who scrubbed in
the same building merely as rivals and was most afraid of the
most miserable, because they offered to work for less and less as
they were pressed harder and harder by debt. Then she told of
the change that had come when the elevator men and even the
lordly janitors had talked to her about an organization and had
said that they must all stand together. She told how gradually
she came to feel sure of her job and of her regular pay, and she
was even starting to buy a house now that she could "calculate"
how much she "could have for sure." Neither she nor any of the
other members knew that the same combination which had organized
the scrubwomen into a union later destroyed it during a strike
inaugurated for their own purposes.
That a Settlement is drawn into the labor issues of its city can
seem remote to its purpose only to those who fail to realize that
so far as the present industrial system thwarts our ethical
demands, not only for social righteousness but for social order,
a Settlement is committed to an effort to understand and, as far
as possible, to alleviate it. That in this effort it should be
drawn into fellowship with the local efforts of trades-unions is
most obvious. This identity of aim apparently commits the
Settlement in the public mind to all the faiths and works of
actual trades-unions. Fellowship has so long implied similarity
of creed that the fact that the Settlement often differs widely
from the policy pursued by trades-unionists and clearly expresses
that difference does not in the least change public opinion in
regard to its identification. This is especially true in periods
of industrial disturbance, although it is exactly at such moments
that the trades-unionists themselves are suspicious of all but
their "own kind." It is during the much longer periods between
strikes that the Settlement's fellowship with trades-unions is
most satisfactory in the agitation for labor legislation and
similar undertakings. The first officers of the Chicago Woman's
Trades Union League were residents of Settlements, although they
can claim little share in the later record the League made in
securing the passage of the Illinois Ten-Hour Law for Women and
in its many other fine undertakings.
Nevertheless the reaction of strikes upon Chicago Settlements
affords an interesting study in social psychology. For whether
Hull-House is in any wise identified with the strike or not,
makes no difference. When "Labor" is in disgrace we are always
regarded as belonging to it and share the opprobrium. In the
public excitement following the Pullman strike Hull-House lost
many friends; later the teamsters' strike caused another such
defection, although my office in both cases had been solely that
of a duly appointed arbitrator.
There is, however, a certain comfort in the assumption I have
often encountered that wherever one's judgment might place the
justice of a given situation, it is understood that one's
sympathy is not alienated by wrongdoing, and that through this
sympathy one is still subject to vicarious suffering. I recall
an incident during a turbulent Chicago strike which brought me
much comfort. On the morning of the day of a luncheon to which I
had accepted an invitation, the waitress, whom I did not know,
said to my prospective hostess that she was sure I could not
come. Upon being asked for her reason she replied that she had
seen in the morning paper that the strikers had killed a "scab"
and she was sure that I would feel quite too badly about such a
thing to be able to keep a social engagement. In spite of the
confused issues, she evidently realized my despair over the
violence in a strike quite as definitely as if she had been told
about it. Perhaps that sort of suffering and the attempt to
interpret opposing forces to each other will long remain a
function of the Settlement, unsatisfactory and difficult as the
role often becomes.
There has gradually developed between the various Settlements of
Chicago a warm fellowship founded upon a like-mindedness
resulting from similar experiences, quite as identity of interest
and endeavor develop an enduring relation between the residents
of the same Settlement. This sense of comradeship is never
stronger than during the hardships and perplexities of a strike
of unskilled workers revolting against the conditions which drag
them even below the level of their European life. At such time
the residents in various Settlements are driven to a standard of
life argument running somewhat in this wise--that as the very
existence of the State depends upon the character of its
citizens, therefore if certain industrial conditions are forcing
the workers below the standard of decency, it becomes possible to
deduce the right of State regulation. Even as late as the
stockyard strike this line of argument was denounced as
"socialism" although it has since been confirmed as wise
statesmanship by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United
States which was apparently secured through the masterly argument
of the Brandeis brief in the Oregon ten-hour case.
In such wise the residents of an industrial neighborhood
gradually comprehend the close connection of their own
difficulties with national and even international movements. The
residents in the Chicago Settlements became pioneer members in
the American branch of the International League for Labor
Legislation, because their neighborhood experiences had made them
only too conscious of the dire need for protective legislation.
In such a league, with its ardent members in every industrial
nation of Europe, with its encouraging reports of the abolition
of all night work for women in six European nations, with its
careful observations on the results of employer's liability
legislation and protection of machinery, one becomes identified
with a movement of world-wide significance and manifold
manifestation.
[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 Terri Perkins.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
[A Celebration ofWomen Writers]
"Chapter XI: Immigrants and Their Children. 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. 230-258.
[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]