IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN
From our very first months at Hull-House we found it much easier
to deal with the first generation of crowded city life than with
the second or third, because it is more natural and cast in a
simpler mold. The Italian and Bohemian peasants who live in
Chicago still put on their bright holiday clothes on a Sunday and
go to visit their cousins. They tramp along with at least a
suggestion of having once walked over plowed fields and breathed
country air. The second generation of city poor too often have
no holiday clothes and consider their relations a "bad lot." I
have heard a drunken man in a maudlin stage babble of his good
country mother and imagine he was driving the cows home, and I
knew that his little son who laughed loud at him would be drunk
earlier in life and would have no pastoral interlude to his
ravings. Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it
is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans. One
thing seemed clear in regard to entertaining immigrants; to
preserve and keep whatever of value their past life contained and
to bring them in contact with a better type of Americans. For
several years, every Saturday evening the entire families of our
Italian neighbors were our guests. These evenings were very
popular during our first winters at Hull-House. Many educated
Italians helped us, and the house became known as a place where
Italians were welcome and where national holidays were observed.
They come to us with their petty lawsuits, sad relics of the
vendetta, with their incorrigible boys, with their hospital
cases, with their aspirations for American clothes, and with
their needs for an interpreter.
An editor of an Italian paper made a genuine connection between
us and the Italian colony, not only with the Neapolitans and the
Sicilians of the immediate neighborhood, but with the educated
connazionali throughout the city, until he went south to start an
agricultural colony in Alabama, in the establishment of which
Hull-House heartily cooperated.
Possibly the South Italians more than any other immigrants
represent the pathetic stupidity of agricultural people crowded
into city tenements, and we were much gratified when thirty
peasant families were induced to move upon the land which they
knew so well how to cultivate. The starting of this colony,
however, was a very expensive affair in spite of the fact that
the colonists purchased the land at two dollars an acre; they
needed much more than raw land, and although it was possible to
collect the small sums necessary to sustain them during the hard
time of the first two years, we were fully convinced that
undertakings of this sort could be conducted properly only by
colonization societies such as England has established, or,
better still, by enlarging the functions of the Federal
Department of Immigration.
An evening similar in purpose to the one devoted to the Italians
was organized for the Germans, in our first year. Owing to the
superior education of our Teutonic guests and the clever leading
of a cultivated German woman, these evenings reflected something
of that cozy social intercourse which is found in its perfection
in the fatherland. Our guests sang a great deal in the tender
minor of the German folksong or in the rousing spirit of the
Rhine, and they slowly but persistently pursued a course in
German history and literature, recovering something of that
poetry and romance which they had long since resigned with other
good things. We found strong family affection between them and
their English-speaking children, but their pleasures were not in
common, and they seldom went out together. Perhaps the greatest
value of the Settlement to them was in placing large and pleasant
rooms with musical facilities at their disposal, and in reviving
their almost forgotten enthusiams. I have seen sons and
daughters stand in complete surprise as their mother's knitting
needles softly beat time to the song she was singing, or her worn
face turned rosy under the hand-clapping as she made an
old-fashioned curtsy at the end of a German poem. It was easy to
fancy a growing touch of respect in her children's manner to her,
and a rising enthusiasm for German literature and reminiscence on
the part of all the family, an effort to bring together the old
life and the new, a respect for the older cultivation, and not
quite so much assurance that the new was the best.
This tendency upon the part of the older immigrants to lose the
amenities of European life without sharing those of America has
often been deplored by keen observers from the home countries.
When Professor Masurek of Prague gave a course of lectures in the
University of Chicago, he was much distressed over the
materialism into which the Bohemians of Chicago had fallen. The
early immigrants had been so stirred by the opportunity to own
real estate, an appeal perhaps to the Slavic land hunger, and
their energies had become so completely absorbed in money-making
that all other interests had apparently dropped away. And yet I
recall a very touching incident in connection with a lecture
Professor Masurek gave at Hull-House, in which he had appealed to
his countrymen to arouse themselves from this tendency to fall
below their home civilization and to forget the great enthusiasm
which had united them into the Pan-Slavic Movement. A Bohemian
widow who supported herself and her two children by scrubbing,
hastily sent her youngest child to purchase, with the twenty-five
cents which was to have supplied them with food the next day, a
bunch of red roses which she presented to the lecturer in
appreciation of his testimony to the reality of the things of the
spirit.
An overmastering desire to reveal the humbler immigrant parents
to their own children lay at the base of what has come to be
called the Hull-House Labor Museum. This was first suggested to
my mind one early spring day when I saw an old Italian woman, her
distaff against her homesick face, patiently spinning a thread by
the simple stick spindle so reminiscent of all southern Europe. I
was walking down Polk Street, perturbed in spirit, because it
seemed so difficult to come into genuine relations with the
Italian women and because they themselves so often lost their
hold upon their Americanized children. It seemed to me that
Hull-House ought to be able to devise some educational enterprise
which should build a bridge between European and American
experiences in such wise as to give them both more meaning and a
sense of relation. I meditated that perhaps the power to see
life as a whole is more needed in the immigrant quarter of a
large city than anywhere else, and that the lack of this power is
the most fruitful source of misunderstanding between European
immigrants and their children, as it is between them and their
American neighbors; and why should that chasm between fathers and
sons, yawning at the feet of each generation, be made so
unnecessarily cruel and impassable to these bewildered
immigrants? Suddenly I looked up and saw the old woman with her
distaff, sitting in the sun on the steps of a tenement house. She
might have served as a model for one of Michelangelo's Fates, but
her face brightened as I passed and, holding up her spindle for
me to see, she called out that when she had spun a little more
yarn, she would knit a pair of stockings for her goddaughter.
The occupation of the old woman gave me the clue that was needed.
Could we not interest the young people working in the
neighborhood factories in these older forms of industry, so that,
through their own parents and grandparents, they would find a
dramatic representation of the inherited resources of their daily
occupation. If these young people could actually see that the
complicated machinery of the factory had been evolved from simple
tools, they might at least make a beginning toward that education
which Dr. Dewey defines as "a continuing reconstruction of
experience." They might also lay a foundation for reverence of
the past which Goethe declares to be the basis of all sound
progress.
My exciting walk on Polk Street was followed by many talks with
Dr. Dewey and with one of the teachers in his school who was a
resident at Hull-House. Within a month a room was fitted up to
which we might invite those of our neighbors who were possessed
of old crafts and who were eager to use them.
We found in the immediate neighborhood at least four varieties of
these most primitive methods of spinning and three distinct
variations of the same spindle in connection with wheels. It was
possible to put these seven into historic sequence and order and
to connect the whole with the present method of factory spinning.
The same thing was done for weaving, and on every Saturday
evening a little exhibit was made of these various forms of labor
in the textile industry. Within one room a Syrian woman, a
Greek, an Italian, a Russian, and an Irishwoman enabled even the
most casual observer to see that there is no break in orderly
evolution if we look at history from the industrial standpoint;
that industry develops similarly and peacefully year by year
among the workers of each nation, heedless of differences in
language, religion, and political experiences.
And then we grew ambitious and arranged lectures upon industrial
history. I remember that after an interesting lecture upon the
industrial revolution in England and a portrayal of the appalling
conditions throughout the weaving districts of the north, which
resulted from the hasty gathering of the weavers into the new
towns, a Russian tailor in the audience was moved to make a
speech. He suggested that whereas time had done much to
alleviate the first difficulties in the transition of weaving
from hand work to steam power, that in the application of steam
to sewing we are still in our first stages, illustrated by the
isolated woman who tries to support herself by hand needlework at
home until driven out by starvation, as many of the hand weavers
had been.
The historical analogy seemed to bring a certain comfort to the
tailor, as did a chart upon the wall showing the infinitesimal
amount of time that steam had been applied to manufacturing
processes compared to the centuries of hand labor. Human
progress is slow and perhaps never more cruel than in the advance
of industry, but is not the worker comforted by knowing that
other historical periods have existed similar to the one in which
he finds himself, and that the readjustment may be shortened and
alleviated by judicious action; and is he not entitled to the
solace which an artistic portrayal of the situation might give
him? I remember the evening of the tailor's speech that I felt
reproached because no poet or artist has endeared the sweaters'
victim to us as George Eliot has made us love the belated weaver,
Silas Marner. The textile museum is connected directly with the
basket weaving, sewing, millinery, embroidery, and dressmaking
constantly being taught at Hull-House, and so far as possible
with the other educational departments; we have also been able to
make a collection of products, of early implements, and of
photographs which are full of suggestion. Yet far beyond its
direct educational value, we prize it because it so often puts
the immigrants into the position of teachers, and we imagine that
it affords them a pleasant change from the tutelage in which all
Americans, including their own children, are so apt to hold them.
I recall a number of Russian women working in a sewing room near
Hull-House, who heard one Christmas week that the House was going
to give a party to which they might come. They arrived one
afternoon, when, unfortunately, there was no party on hand and,
although the residents did their best to entertain them with
impromptu music and refreshments, it was quite evident that they
were greatly disappointed. Finally it was suggested that they be
shown the Labor Museum--where gradually the thirty sodden, tired
women were transformed. They knew how to use the spindles and
were delighted to find the Russian spinning frame. Many of them
had never seen the spinning wheel, which has not penetrated to
certain parts of Russia, and they regarded it as a new and
wonderful invention. They turned up their dresses to show their
homespun petticoats; they tried the looms; they explained the
difficulty of the old patterns; in short, from having been
stupidly entertained, they themselves did the entertaining.
Because of a direct appeal to former experiences, the immigrant
visitors were able for the moment to instruct their American
hostesses in an old and honored craft, as was indeed becoming to
their age and experience.
In some such ways as these have the Labor Museum and the shops
pointed out the possibilities which Hull-House has scarcely begun
to develop, of demonstrating that culture is an understanding of
the long-established occupations and thoughts of men, of the arts
with which they have solaced their toil. A yearning to recover
for the household arts something of their early sanctity and
meaning arose strongly within me one evening when I was attending
a Passover Feast to which I had been invited by a Jewish family
in the neighborhood, where the traditional and religious
significance of the woman's daily activity was still retained.
The kosher food the Jewish mother spread before her family had
been prepared according to traditional knowledge and with
constant care in the use of utensils; upon her had fallen the
responsibility to make all ready according to Mosaic instructions
that the great crisis in a religious history might be fittingly
set forth by her husband and son. Aside from the grave religious
significance in the ceremony, my mind was filled with shifting
pictures of woman's labor with which travel makes one familiar;
the Indian women grinding grain outside of their huts as they
sing praises to the sun and rain; a file of white-clad Moorish
women whom I had once seen waiting their turn at a well in
Tangiers; south Italian women kneeling in a row along the stream
and beating their wet clothes against the smooth white stones;
the milking, the gardening, the marketing in thousands of
hamlets, which are such direct expressions of the solicitude and
affection at the basis of all family life.
There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed
the charm of woman's primitive activities. I recall a certain
Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class
in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum
exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front
door while she herself went around to a side door because she did
not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of
the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over
her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening,
however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of
visitors from the School of Education who much admired the
spinning, and she concluded from their conversation that her
mother was "the best stick-spindle spinner in America." When she
inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction, I took
occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had
lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the
opportunity she and the other women of the village had to drop
their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they had developed a
skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I
dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life--how hard
it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to
give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department
store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these
things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to
learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter
to know something of the old ways.
That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own
mind persistently dwelt, was that her mother's whole life had
been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and
narrowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to
local sanctities--to the shrine before which she had always
prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church--and
then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to
sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and
domestic life, and she now walked timidly but with poignant
sensibility upon a new and strange shore.
It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other
background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at
least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of
the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which
had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came
into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud
at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much
admired.
A club of necktie workers formerly meeting at Hull-House
persistently resented any attempt on the part of their director
to improve their minds. The president once said that she
"wouldn't be caught dead at a lecture," that she came to the club
"to get some fun out of it," and indeed it was most natural that
she should crave recreation after a hard day's work. One evening
I saw the entire club listening to quite a stiff lecture in the
Labor Museum and to my rather wicked remark to the president that
I was surprised to see her enjoying a lecture, she replied that
she did not call this a lecture, she called this "getting next to
the stuff you work with all the time." It was perhaps the
sincerest tribute we have ever received as to the success of the
undertaking.
The Labor Museum continually demanded more space as it was
enriched by a fine textile exhibit lent by the Field Museum, and
later by carefully selected specimens of basketry from the
Philippines. The shops have finally included a group of three or
four women, Irish, Italian, Danish, who have become a permanent
working force in the textile department which has developed into
a self-supporting industry through the sale of its homespun
products.
These women and a few men, who come to the museum to utilize
their European skill in pottery, metal, and wood, demonstrate
that immigrant colonies might yield to our American life
something very valuable, if their resources were intelligently
studied and developed. I recall an Italian, who had decorated
the doorposts of his tenement with a beautiful pattern he had
previously used in carving the reredos of a Neapolitan church,
who was "fired" by his landlord on the ground of destroying
property. His feelings were hurt, not so much that he had been
put out of his house, as that his work had been so disregarded;
and he said that when people traveled in Italy they liked to look
at wood carvings but that in America "they only made money out of
you."
Sometimes the suppression of the instinct of workmanship is
followed by more disastrous results. A Bohemian whose little
girl attended classes at Hull-House, in one of his periodic
drunken spells had literally almost choked her to death, and
later had committed suicide when in delirium tremens. His poor
wife, who stayed a week at Hull-House after the disaster until a
new tenement could be arranged for her, one day showed me a gold
ring which her husband had made for their betrothal. It
exhibited the most exquisite workmanship, and she said that
although in the old country he had been a goldsmith, in America
he had for twenty years shoveled coal in a furnace room of a
large manufacturing plant; that whenever she saw one of his
"restless fits," which preceded his drunken periods, "coming on,"
if she could provide him with a bit of metal and persuade him to
stay at home and work at it, he was all right and the time passed
without disaster, but that "nothing else would do it." This story
threw a flood of light upon the dead man's struggle and on the
stupid maladjustment which had broken him down. Why had we never
been told? Why had our interest in the remarkable musical
ability of his child blinded us to the hidden artistic ability of
the father? We had forgotten that a long-established occupation
may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art
with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his
uncertain temperament.
There are many examples of touching fidelity to immigrant parents
on the part of their grown children; a young man who day after
day attends ceremonies which no longer express his religious
convictions and who makes his vain effort to interest his Russian
Jewish father in social problems; a daughter who might earn much
more money as a stenographer could she work from Monday morning
till Saturday night, but who quietly and docilely makes neckties
for low wages because she can thus abstain from work Saturdays to
please her father; these young people, like poor Maggie Tulliver,
through many painful experiences have reached the conclusion that
pity, memory, and faithfulness are natural ties with paramount
claims.
This faithfulness, however, is sometimes ruthlessly imposed upon
by immigrant parents who, eager for money and accustomed to the
patriarchal authority of peasant households, hold their children
in a stern bondage which requires a surrender of all their wages
and concedes no time or money for pleasures.
There are many convincing illustrations that this parental
harshness often results in juvenile delinquency. A Polish boy of
seventeen came to Hull-House one day to ask a contribution of
fifty cents "towards a flower piece for the funeral of an old
Hull-House club boy." A few questions made it clear that the
object was fictitious, whereupon the boy broke down and
half-defiantly stated that he wanted to buy two twenty-five cent
tickets, one for his girl and one for himself, to a dance of the
Benevolent Social Twos; that he hadn't a penny of his own
although he had worked in a brass foundry for three years and had
been advanced twice, because he always had to give his pay
envelope unopened to his father; "just look at the clothes he
buys me" was his concluding remark.
Perhaps the girls are held even more rigidly. In a recent
investigation of two hundred working girls it was found that only
five per cent had the use of their own money and that sixty-two
per cent turned in all they earned, literally every penny, to
their mothers. It was through this little investigation that we
first knew Marcella, a pretty young German girl who helped her
widowed mother year after year to care for a large family of
younger children. She was content for the most part although her
mother's old-country notions of dress gave her but an
infinitesimal amount of her own wages to spend on her clothes,
and she was quite sophisticated as to proper dressing because she
sold silk in a neighborhood department store. Her mother
approved of the young man who was showing her various attentions
and agreed that Marcella should accept his invitation to a ball,
but would allow her not a penny toward a new gown to replace one
impossibly plain and shabby. Marcella spent a sleepless night
and wept bitterly, although she well knew that the doctor's bill
for the children's scarlet fever was not yet paid. The next day
as she was cutting off three yards of shining pink silk, the
thought came to her that it would make her a fine new waist to
wear to the ball. She wistfully saw it wrapped in paper and
carelessly stuffed into the muff of the purchaser, when suddenly
the parcel fell upon the floor. No one was looking and quick as
a flash the girl picked it up and pushed it into her blouse. The
theft was discovered by the relentless department store detective
who, for "the sake of example," insisted upon taking the case
into court. The poor mother wept bitter tears over this downfall
of her "frommes Madchen" and no one had the heart to tell her of
her own blindness.
I know a Polish boy whose earnings were all given to his father
who gruffly refused all requests for pocket money. One Christmas
his little sisters, having been told by their mother that they
were too poor to have any Christmas presents, appealed to the big
brother as to one who was earning money of his own. Flattered by
the implication, but at the same time quite impecunious, the
night before Christmas he nonchalantly walked through a
neighboring department store and stole a manicure set for one
little sister and a string of beads for the other. He was caught
at the door by the house detective as one of those children whom
each local department store arrests in the weeks before Christmas
at the daily rate of eight to twenty. The youngest of these
offenders are seldom taken into court but are either sent home
with a warning or turned over to the officers of the Juvenile
Protective Association. Most of these premature law breakers are
in search of Americanized clothing and others are only looking
for playthings. They are all distracted by the profusion and
variety of the display, and their moral sense is confused by the
general air of openhandedness.
These disastrous efforts are not unlike those of many younger
children who are constantly arrested for petty thieving because
they are too eager to take home food or fuel which will relieve
the distress and need they so constantly hear discussed. The
coal on the wagons, the vegetables displayed in front of the
grocery shops, the very wooden blocks in the loosened street
paving are a challenge to their powers to help out at home. A
Bohemian boy who was out on parole from the old detention home of
the Juvenile Court itself, brought back five stolen chickens to
the matron for Sunday dinner, saying that he knew the Committee
were "having a hard time to fill up so many kids and perhaps
these fowl would help out." The honest immigrant parents, totally
ignorant of American laws and municipal regulations, often send a
child to pick up coal on the railroad tracks or to stand at three
o'clock in the morning before the side door of a restaurant which
gives away broken food, or to collect grain for the chickens at
the base of elevators and standing cars. The latter custom
accounts for the large number of boys arrested for breaking the
seals on grain freight cars. It is easy for a child thus trained
to accept the proposition of a junk dealer to bring him bars of
iron stored in freight yards. Four boys quite recently had thus
carried away and sold to one man two tons of iron.
Four fifths of the children brought into the Juvenile Court in
Chicago are the children of foreigners. The Germans are the
greatest offenders, Polish next. Do their children suffer from
the excess of virtue in those parents so eager to own a house and
lot? One often sees a grasping parent in the court, utterly
broken down when the Americanized youth who has been brought to
grief clings as piteously to his peasant father as if he were
still a frightened little boy in the steerage.
Many of these children have come to grief through their premature
fling into city life, having thrown off parental control as they
have impatiently discarded foreign ways. Boys of ten and twelve
will refuse to sleep at home, preferring the freedom of an old
brewery vault or an empty warehouse to the obedience required by
their parents, and for days these boys will live on the milk and
bread which they steal from the back porches after the early
morning delivery. Such children complain that there is "no fun"
at home. One little chap who was given a vacant lot to cultivate
by the City Garden Association insisted upon raising only popcorn
and tried to present the entire crop to Hull-House "to be used
for the parties," with the stipulation that he would have "to be
invited every single time." Then there are little groups of
dissipated young men who pride themselves upon their ability to
live without working and who despise all the honest and sober
ways of their immigrant parents. They are at once a menace and a
center of demoralization. Certainly the bewildered parents,
unable to speak English and ignorant of the city, whose children
have disappeared for days or weeks, have often come to
Hull-House, evincing that agony which fairly separates the marrow
from the bone, as if they had discovered a new type of suffering,
devoid of the healing in familiar sorrows. It is as if they did
not know how to search for the children without the assistance of
the children themselves. Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of
such cases is their revelation of the premature dependence of the
older and wiser upon the young and foolish, which is in itself
often responsible for the situation because it has given the
children an undue sense of their own importance and a false
security that they can take care of themselves.
On the other hand, an Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking
at the public school will help her mother to connect the entire
family with American food and household habits. That the mother
has never baked bread in Italy--only mixed it in her own house
and then taken it out to the village oven--makes all the more
valuable her daughter's understanding of the complicated cooking
stove. The same thing is true of the girl who learns to sew in
the public school, and more than anything else, perhaps, of the
girl who receives the first simple instruction in the care of
little children--that skillful care which every tenement-house
baby requires if he is to be pulled through his second summer. As
a result of this teaching I recall a young girl who carefully
explained to her Italian mother that the reason the babies in
Italy were so healthy and the babies in Chicago were so sickly,
was not, as her mother had firmly insisted, because her babies in
Italy had goat's milk and her babies in America had cow's milk,
but because the milk in Italy was clean and the milk in Chicago
was dirty. She said that when you milked your own goat before
the door, you knew that the milk was clean, but when you bought
milk from the grocery store after it had been carried for many
miles in the country, you couldn't tell whether it was fit for
the baby to drink until the men from the City Hall who had
watched it all the way said that it was all right.
Thus through civic instruction in the public schools, the Italian
woman slowly became urbanized in the sense in which the word was
used by her own Latin ancestors, and thus the habits of her
entire family were modified. The public schools in the immigrant
colonies deserve all the praise as Americanizing agencies which
can be bestowed upon them, and there is little doubt that the
fast-changing curriculum in the direction of the vacation-school
experiments will react more directly upon such households.
It is difficult to write of the relation of the older and most
foreign-looking immigrants to the children of other people--the
Italians whose fruit-carts are upset simply because they are
"dagoes," or the Russian peddlers who are stoned and sometimes
badly injured because it has become a code of honor in a gang of
boys to thus express their derision. The members of a Protective
Association of Jewish Peddlers organized at Hull-House related
daily experiences in which old age had been treated with such
irreverence, cherished dignity with such disrespect, that a
listener caught the passion of Lear in the old texts, as a
platitude enunciated by a man who discovers in it his own
experience thrills us as no unfamiliar phrases can possibly do.
The Greeks are filled with amazed rage when their very name is
flung at them as an opprobrious epithet. Doubtless these
difficulties would be much minimized in America, if we faced our
own race problem with courage and intelligence, and these very
Mediterranean immigrants might give us valuable help. Certainly
they are less conscious than the Anglo-Saxon of color
distinctions, perhaps because of their traditional familiarity
with Carthage and Egypt. They listened with respect and
enthusiasm to a scholarly address delivered by Professor Du Bois
at Hull-House on a Lincoln's birthday, with apparently no
consciousness of that race difference which color seems to
accentuate so absurdly, and upon my return from various
conferences held in the interest of "the advancement of colored
people," I have had many illuminating conversations with my
cosmopolitan neighbors.
The celebration of national events has always been a source of
new understanding and companionship with the members of the
contiguous foreign colonies not only between them and their
American neighbors but between them and their own children. One
of our earliest Italian events was a rousing commemoration of
Garibaldi's birthday, and his imposing bust, presented to
Hull-House that evening, was long the chief ornament of our front
hall. It called forth great enthusiasm from the connazionali
whom Ruskin calls, not the "common people" of Italy, but the
"companion people" because of their power for swift sympathy.
A huge Hellenic meeting held at Hull-House, in which the
achievements of the classic period were set forth both in Greek
and English by scholars of well-known repute, brought us into a
new sense of fellowship with all our Greek neighbors. As the
mayor of Chicago was seated upon the right hand of the dignified
senior priest of the Greek Church and they were greeted
alternately in the national hymns of America and Greece, one felt
a curious sense of the possibility of transplanting to new and
crude Chicago some of the traditions of Athens itself, so deeply
cherished in the hearts of this group of citizens.
The Greeks indeed gravely consider their traditions as their most
precious possession and more than once in meetings of protest
held by the Greek colony against the aggressions of the
Bulgarians in Macedonia, I have heard it urged that the
Bulgarians are trying to establish a protectorate, not only for
their immediate advantage, but that they may claim a glorious
history for the "barbarous country." It is said that on the basis
of this protectorate, they are already teaching in their schools
that Alexander the Great was a Bulgarian and that it will be but
a short time before they claim Aristotle himself, an indignity
the Greeks will never suffer!
To me personally the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of
Mazzini's birth was a matter of great interest. Throughout the
world that day Italians who believed in a United Italy came
together. They recalled the hopes of this man who, with all his
devotion to his country was still more devoted to humanity and
who dedicated to the workingmen of Italy, an appeal so
philosophical, so filled with a yearning for righteousness, that
it transcended all national boundaries and became a bugle call
for "The Duties of Man." A copy of this document was given to
every school child in the public schools of Italy on this one
hundredth anniversary, and as the Chicago branch of the Society
of Young Italy marched into our largest hall and presented to
Hull-House an heroic bust of Mazzini, I found myself devoutly
hoping that the Italian youth, who have committed their future to
America, might indeed become "the Apostles of the fraternity of
nations" and that our American citizenship might be built without
disturbing these foundations which were laid of old time.
[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 XII: Tolstoyism." by 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.
259-280.
[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]