PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS
One of the striking features of our neighborhood twenty years
ago, and one to which we never became reconciled, was the
presence of huge wooden garbage boxes fastened to the street
pavement in which the undisturbed refuse accumulated day by day.
The system of garbage collecting was inadequate throughout the
city but it became the greatest menace in a ward such as ours,
where the normal amount of waste was much increased by the
decayed fruit and vegetables discarded by the Italian and Greek
fruit peddlers, and by the residuum left over from the piles of
filthy rags which were fished out of the city dumps and brought
to the homes of the rag pickers for further sorting and washing.
The children of our neighborhood twenty years ago played their
games in and around these huge garbage boxes. They were the
first objects that the toddling child learned to climb; their
bulk afforded a barricade and their contents provided missiles in
all the battles of the older boys; and finally they became the
seats upon which absorbed lovers held enchanted converse. We are
obliged to remember that all children eat everything which they
find and that odors have a curious and intimate power of
entwining themselves into our tenderest memories, before even the
residents of Hull-House can understand their own early enthusiasm
for the removal of these boxes and the establishment of a better
system of refuse collection.
It is easy for even the most conscientious citizen of Chicago to
forget the foul smells of the stockyards and the garbage dumps,
when he is living so far from them that he is only occasionally
made conscious of their existence but the residents of a
Settlement are perforce constantly surrounded by them. During
our first three years on Halsted Street, we had established a
small incinerator at Hull-House and we had many times reported
the untoward conditions of the ward to the city hall. We had
also arranged many talks for the immigrants, pointing out that
although a woman may sweep her own doorway in her native village
and allow the reuse to innocently decay in the open air and
sunshine, in a crowded city quarter, if the garbage is not
properly collected and destroyed, a tenement-house mother may see
her children sicken and die, and that the immigrants must
therefore not only keep their own houses clean, but must also
help the authorities to keep the city clean.
Possibly our efforts slightly modified the worst conditions, but
they still remained intolerable, and the fourth summer the
situation became for me absolutely desperate when I realized in a
moment of panic that my delicate little nephew for whom I was
guardian, could not be with me at Hull-House at all unless the
sickening odors were reduced. I may well be ashamed that other
delicate children who were torn from their families, not into
boarding school but into eternity, had not long before driven me
to effective action. Under the direction of the first man who
came as a resident to Hull-House we began a systematic
investigation of the city system of garbage collection, both as
to its efficiency in other wards and its possible connection with
the death rate in the various wards of the city.
The Hull-House Woman's Club had been organized the year before by
the resident kindergartner who had first inaugurated a mother's
meeting. The new members came together, however, in quite a new
way that summer when we discussed with them the high death rate
so persistent in our ward. After several club meetings devoted
to the subject, despite the fact that the death rate rose highest
in the congested foreign colonies and not in the streets in which
most of the Irish American club women lived, twelve of their
number undertook in connection with the residents, to carefully
investigate the conditions of the alleys. During August and
September the substantiated reports of violations of the law sent
in from Hull-House to the health department were one thousand and
thirty-seven. For the club woman who had finished a long day's
work of washing or ironing followed by the cooking of a hot
supper, it would have been much easier to sit on her doorstep
during a summer evening than to go up and down ill-kept alleys
and get into trouble with her neighbors over the condition of
their garbage boxes. It required both civic enterprise and moral
conviction to be willing to do this three evenings a week during
the hottest and most uncomfortable months of the year.
Nevertheless, a certain number of women persisted, as did the
residents, and three city inspectors in succession were
transferred from the ward because of unsatisfactory services.
Still the death rate remained high and the condition seemed
little improved throughout the next winter. In sheer
desperation, the following spring when the city contracts were
awarded for the removal of garbage, with the backing of two
well-known business men, I put in a bid for the garbage removal
of the nineteenth ward. My paper was thrown out on a
technicality but the incident induced the mayor to appoint me the
garbage inspector of the ward.
The salary was a thousand dollars a year, and the loss of that
political "plum" made a great stir among the politicians. The
position was no sinecure whether regarded from the point of view
of getting up at six in the morning to see that the men were
early at work; or of following the loaded wagons, uneasily
dropping their contents at intervals, to their dreary destination
at the dump; or of insisting that the contractor must increase
the number of his wagons from nine to thirteen and from thirteen
to seventeen, although he assured me that he lost money on every
one and that the former inspector had let him off with seven; or
of taking careless landlords into court because they would not
provide the proper garbage receptacles; or of arresting the
tenant who tried to make the garbage wagons carry away the
contents of his stable.
With the two or three residents who nobly stood by, we set up six
of those doleful incinerators which are supposed to burn garbage
with the fuel collected in the alley itself. The one factory in
town which could utilize old tin cans was a window weight
factory, and we deluged that with ten times as many tin cans as
it could use--much less would pay for. We made desperate
attempts to have the dead animals removed by the contractor who
was paid most liberally by the city for that purpose but who, we
slowly discovered, always made the police ambulances do the work,
delivering the carcasses upon freight cars for shipment to a soap
factory in Indiana where they were sold for a good price although
the contractor himself was the largest stockholder in the
concern. Perhaps our greatest achievement was the discovery of a
pavement eighteen inches under the surface in a narrow street,
although after it was found we triumphantly discovered a record
of its existence in the city archives. The Italians living on
the street were much interested but displayed little
astonishment, perhaps because they were accustomed to see buried
cities exhumed. This pavement became the casus belli between
myself and the street commissioner when I insisted that its
restoration belonged to him, after I had removed the first eight
inches of garbage. The matter was finally settled by the mayor
himself, who permitted me to drive him to the entrance of the
street in what the children called my "garbage phaeton" and who
took my side of the controversy.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, who had done some
excellent volunteer inspection in both Chicago and Pittsburg,
became my deputy and performed the work in a most thoroughgoing
manner for three years. During the last two she was under the
regime of civil service for in 1895, to the great joy of many
citizens, the Illinois legislature made that possible.
Many of the foreign-born women of the ward were much shocked by
this abrupt departure into the ways of men, and it took a great
deal of explanation to convey the idea even remotely that if it
were a womanly task to go about in tenement houses in order to
nurse the sick, it might be quite as womanly to go through the
same district in order to prevent the breeding of so-called
"filth diseases." While some of the women enthusiastically
approved the slowly changing conditions and saw that their
housewifely duties logically extended to the adjacent alleys and
streets, they yet were quite certain that "it was not a lady's
job." A revelation of this attitude was made one day in a
conversation which the inspector heard vigorously carried on in a
laundry. One of the employees was leaving and was expressing her
mind concerning the place in no measured terms, summing up her
contempt for it as follows: "I would rather be the girl who goes
about in the alleys than to stay here any longer!"
And yet the spectacle of eight hours' work for eight hours' pay,
the even-handed justice to all citizens irrespective of "pull,"
the dividing of responsibility between landlord and tenant, and
the readiness to enforce obedience to law from both, was,
perhaps, one of the most valuable demonstrations which could have
been made. Such daily living on the part of the office holder is
of infinitely more value than many talks on civics for, after
all, we credit most easily that which we see. The careful
inspection combined with other causes, brought about a great
improvement in the cleanliness and comfort of the neighborhood
and one happy day, when the death rate of our ward was found to
have dropped from third to seventh in the list of city wards and
was so reported to our Woman's Club, the applause which followed
recorded the genuine sense of participation in the result, and a
public spirit which had "made good." But the cleanliness of the
ward was becoming much too popular to suit our all-powerful
alderman and, although we felt fatuously secure under the regime
of civil service, he found a way to circumvent us by eliminating
the position altogether. He introduced an ordinance into the
city council which combined the collection of refuse with the
cleaning and repairing of the streets, the whole to be placed
under a ward superintendent. The office of course was to be
filled under civil service regulations but only men were eligible
to the examination. Although this latter regulation was
afterwards modified in favor of one woman, it was retained long
enough to put the nineteenth ward inspector out of office.
Of course our experience in inspecting only made us more
conscious of the wretched housing conditions over which we had
been distressed from the first. It was during the World's Fair
summer that one of the Hull-House residents in a public address
upon housing reform used as an example of indifferent landlordism
a large block in the neighborhood occupied by small tenements and
stables unconnected with a street sewer, as was much similar
property in the vicinity. In the lecture the resident spared
neither a description of the property nor the name of the owner.
The young man who owned the property was justly indignant at this
public method of attack and promptly came to investigate the
condition of the property. Together we made a careful tour of
the houses and stables and in the face of the conditions that we
found there, I could not but agree with him that supplying South
Italian peasants with sanitary appliances seemed a difficult
undertaking. Nevertheless he was unwilling that the block should
remain in its deplorable state, and he finally cut through the
dilemma with the rash proposition that he would give a free lease
of the entire tract to Hull-House, accompanying the offer,
however, with the warning remark, that if we should choose to use
the income from the rents in sanitary improvements we should be
throwing our money away.
Even when we decided that the houses were so bad that we could
not undertake the task of improving them, he was game and stuck
to his proposition that we should have a free lease. We finally
submitted a plan that the houses should be torn down and the
entire tract turned into a playground, although cautious advisers
intimated that it would be very inconsistent to ask for
subscriptions for the support of Hull-House when we were known to
have thrown away an income of two thousand dollars a year. We,
however, felt that a spectacle of inconsistency was better than
one of bad landlordism and so the worst of the houses were
demolished, the best three were sold and moved across the street
under careful provision that they might never be used for junk-
shops or saloons, and a public playground was finally
established. Hull-House became responsible for its management
for ten years, at the end of which time it was turned over to the
City Playground Commission although from the first the city
detailed a policeman who was responsible for its general order
and who became a valued adjunct of the House.
During fifteen years this public-spirited owner of the property
paid all the taxes, and when the block was finally sold he made
possible the playground equipment of a near-by schoolyard. On
the other hand, the dispossessed tenants, a group of whom had to
be evicted by legal process before their houses could be torn
down, have never ceased to mourn their former estates. Only the
other day I met upon the street an old Italian harness maker, who
said that he had never succeeded so well anywhere else nor found
a place that "seemed so much like Italy."
Festivities of various sorts were held on this early playground,
always a May day celebration with its Maypole dance and its May
queen. I remember that one year that honor of being queen was
offered to the little girl who should pick up the largest number
of scraps of paper which littered all the streets and alleys. The
children that spring had been organized into a league, and each
member had been provided with a stiff piece of wire upon the
sharpened point of which stray bits of paper were impaled and
later soberly counted off into a large box in the Hull-House
alley. The little Italian girl who thus won the scepter took it
very gravely as the just reward of hard labor, and we were all so
absorbed in the desire for clean and tidy streets that we were
wholly oblivious to the incongruity of thus selecting "the queen
of love and beauty."
It was at the end of the second year that we received a visit from
the warden of Toynbee Hall and his wife, as they were returning to
England from a journey around the world. They had lived in East
London for many years, and had been identified with the public
movements for its betterment. They were much shocked that, in a
new country with conditions still plastic and hopeful, so little
attention had been paid to experiments and methods of amelioration
which had already been tried; and they looked in vain through our
library for blue books and governmental reports which recorded
painstaking study into the conditions of English cities.
They were the first of a long line of English visitors to express
the conviction that many things in Chicago were untoward not
through paucity of public spirit but through a lack of political
machinery adapted to modern city life. This was not all of the
situation but perhaps no casual visitor could be expected to see
that these matters of detail seemed unimportant to a city in the
first flush of youth, impatient of correction and convinced that
all would be well with its future. The most obvious faults were
those connected with the congested housing of the immigrant
population, nine tenths of them from the country, who carried on
all sorts of traditional activities in the crowded tenements.
That a group of Greeks should be permitted to slaughter sheep in
a basement, that Italian women should be allowed to sort over
rags collected from the city dumps, not only within the city
limits but in a court swarming with little children, that
immigrant bakers should continue unmolested to bake bread for
their neighbors in unspeakably filthy spaces under the pavement,
appeared incredible to visitors accustomed to careful city
regulations. I recall two visits made to the Italian quarter by
John Burns--the second, thirteen years after the first. During
the latter visit it seemed to him unbelievable that a certain
house owned by a rich Italian should have been permitted to
survive. He remembered with the greatest minuteness the
positions of the houses on the court, with the exact space
between the front and rear tenements, and he asked at once
whether we had been able to cut a window into a dark hall as he
had recommended thirteen years before. Although we were obliged
to confess that the landlord would not permit the window to be
cut, we were able to report that a City Homes Association had
existed for ten years; that following a careful study of tenement
conditions in Chicago, the text of which had been written by a
Hull-House resident, the association had obtained the enactment
of a model tenement-house code, and that their secretary had
carefully watched the administration of the law for years so that
its operation might not be minimized by the granting of too many
exceptions in the city council. Our progress still seemed slow
to Mr. Burns because in Chicago, the actual houses were quite
unchanged, embodying features long since declared illegal in
London. Only this year could we have reported to him, had he
again come to challenge us, that the provisions of the law had at
last been extended to existing houses and that a conscientious
corps of inspectors under an efficient chief, were fast remedying
the most glaring evils, while a band of nurses and doctors were
following hard upon the "trail of the white hearse."
The mere consistent enforcement of existing laws and efforts for
their advance often placed Hull-House, at least temporarily, into
strained relations with its neighbors. I recall a continuous
warfare against local landlords who would move wrecks of old
houses as a nucleus for new ones in order to evade the provisions
of the building code, and a certain Italian neighbor who was
filled with bitterness because his new rear tenement was
discovered to be illegal. It seemed impossible to make him
understand that the health of the tenants was in any wise as
important as his undisturbed rents.
Nevertheless many evils constantly arise in Chicago from
congested housing which wiser cities forestall and prevent; the
inevitable boarders crowded into a dark tenement already too
small for the use of the immigrant family occupying it; the
surprisingly large number of delinquent girls who have become
criminally involved with their own fathers and uncles; the school
children who cannot find a quiet spot in which to read or study
and who perforce go into the streets each evening; the
tuberculosis superinduced and fostered by the inadequate rooms
and breathing spaces. One of the Hull-House residents, under the
direction of a Chicago physician who stands high as an authority
on tuberculosis and who devotes a large proportion of his time to
our vicinity, made an investigation into housing conditions as
related to tuberculosis with a result as startling as that of the
"lung block" in New York.
It is these subtle evils of wretched and inadequate housing which
are often the most disastrous. In the summer of 1902 during an
epidemic of typhoid fever in which our ward, although containing
but one thirty-sixth of the population of the city, registered
one sixth of the total number of deaths, two of the Hull-House
residents made an investigation of the methods of plumbing in the
houses adjacent to conspicuous groups of fever cases. They
discovered among the people who had been exposed to the
infection, a widow who had lived in the ward for a number of
years, in a comfortable little house of her own. Although the
Italian immigrants were closing in all around her, she was not
willing to sell her property and to move away until she had
finished the education of her children. In the meantime she held
herself quite aloof from her Italian neighbors and could never be
drawn into any of the public efforts to secure a better code of
tenement-house sanitation. Her two daughters were sent to an
eastern college. One June when one of them had graduated and the
other still had two years before she took her degree, they came
to the spotless little house and their self-sacrificing mother
for the summer holiday. They both fell ill with typhoid fever
and one daughter died because the mother's utmost efforts could
not keep the infection out of her own house. The entire disaster
affords, perhaps, a fair illustration of the futility of the
individual conscience which would isolate a family from the rest
of the community and its interests.
The careful information collected concerning the juxtaposition of
the typhoid cases to the various systems of plumbing and
nonplumbing was made the basis of a bacteriological study by
another resident, Dr. Alice Hamilton, as to the possibility of
the infection having been carried by flies. Her researches were
so convincing that they have been incorporated into the body of
scientific data supporting that theory, but there were also
practical results from the investigation. It was discovered that
the wretched sanitary appliances through which alone the
infection could have become so widely spread, would not have been
permitted to remain, unless the city inspector had either been
criminally careless or open to the arguments of favored
landlords.
The agitation finally resulted in a long and stirring trial
before the civil service board of half of the employees in the
Sanitary Bureau, with the final discharge of eleven out of the
entire force of twenty-four. The inspector in our neighborhood
was a kindly old man, greatly distressed over the affair, and
quite unable to understand why he should have not used his
discretion as to the time when a landlord should be forced to put
in modern appliances. If he was "very poor," or "just about to
sell his place," or "sure that the house would be torn down to
make room for a factory," why should one "inconvenience" him? The
old man died soon after the trial, feeling persecuted to the very
last and not in the least understanding what it was all about.
We were amazed at the commercial ramifications which graft in the
city hall involved and at the indignation which interference with
it produced. Hull-House lost some large subscriptions as the
result of this investigation, a loss which, if not easy to bear,
was at least comprehensible. We also uncovered unexpected graft
in connection with the plumbers' unions, and but for the fearless
testimony of one of their members, could never have brought the
trial to a successful issue.
Inevitable misunderstanding also developed in connection with the
attempt on the part of Hull-House residents to prohibit the sale
of cocaine to minors, which brought us into sharp conflict with
many druggists. I recall an Italian druggist living on the edge
of the neighborhood, who finally came with a committee of his
countryman to see what Hull-House wanted of him, thoroughly
convinced that no such effort could be disinterested. One dreary
trial after another had been lost through the inadequacy of the
existing legislation and after many attempts to secure better
legal regulation of its sale, a new law with the cooperation of
many agencies was finally secured in 1907. Through all this the
Italian druggist, who had greatly profited by the sale of cocaine
to boys, only felt outraged and abused. And yet the thought of
this campaign brings before my mind with irresistible force, a
young Italian boy who died,--a victim of the drug at the age of
seventeen. He had been in our kindergarten as a handsome merry
child, in our clubs as a vivacious boy, and then gradually there
was an eclipse of all that was animated and joyous and promising,
and when I at last saw him in his coffin, it was impossible to
connect that haggard shriveled body with what I had known before.
A midwife investigation, undertaken in connection with the
Chicago Medical Society, while showing the great need of further
state regulation in the interest of the most ignorant mothers and
helpless children, brought us into conflict with one of the most
venerable of all customs. Was all this a part of the unending
struggle between the old and new, or were these oppositions so
unexpected and so unlooked for merely a reminder of that old bit
of wisdom that "there is no guarding against interpretations"?
Perhaps more subtle still, they were due to that very
super-refinement of disinterestedness which will not justify
itself, that it may feel superior to public opinion. Some of our
investigations of course had no such untoward results, such as
"An Intensive Study of Truancy" undertaken by a resident of
Hull-House in connection with the compulsory education department
of the Board of Education and the Visiting Nurses Association.
The resident, Mrs. Britton, who, having had charge of our
children's clubs for many years, knew thousands of children in
the neighborhood, made a detailed study of three hundred families
tracing back the habitual truancy of the child to economic and
social causes. This investigation preceded a most interesting
conference on truancy held under a committee of which I was a
member from the Chicago Board of Education. It left lasting
results upon the administration of the truancy law as well as the
cooperation of volunteer bodies.
We continually conduct small but careful investigations at
Hull-House, which may guide us in our immediate doings such as two
recently undertaken by Mrs. Britton, one upon the reading of school
children before new books were bought for the children's club
libraries, and another on the proportion of tuberculosis among
school children, before we opened a little experimental outdoor
school on one of our balconies. Some of the Hull-House
investigations are purely negative in result; we once made an
attempt to test the fatigue of factory girls in order to determine
how far overwork superinduced the tuberculosis to which such a
surprising number of them were victims. The one scientific
instrument it seemed possible to use was an ergograph, a
complicated and expensive instrument kindly lent to us from the
physiological laboratory of the University of Chicago. I remember
the imposing procession we made from Hull-House to the factory full
of working women, in which the proprietor allowed us to make the
tests; first there was the precious instrument on a hand truck
guarded by an anxious student and the young physician who was going
to take the tests every afternoon; then there was Dr. Hamilton the
resident in charge of the investigation, walking with a scientist
who was interested to see that the instrument was properly
installed; I followed in the rear to talk once more to the
proprietor of the factory to be quite sure that he would permit the
experiment to go on. The result of all this preparation, however,
was to have the instrument record less fatigue at the end of the
day than at the beginning, not because the girls had not worked
hard and were not "dog tired" as they confessed, but because the
instrument was not fitted to find it out.
For many years we have administered a branch station of the federal
post office at Hull-House, which we applied for in the first
instance because our neighbors lost such a large percentage of the
money they sent to Europe, through the commissions to middle men.
The experience in the post office constantly gave us data for
urging the establishment of postal savings as we saw one perplexed
immigrant after another turning away in bewilderment when he was
told that the United States post office did not receive savings.
We find increasingly, however, that the best results are to be
obtained in investigations as in other undertakings, by combining
our researches with those of other public bodies or with the
State itself. When all the Chicago Settlements found themselves
distressed over the condition of the newsboys who, because they
are merchants and not employees, do not come under the provisions
of the Illinois child labor law, they united in the investigation
of a thousand young newsboys, who were all interviewed on the
streets during the same twenty-four hours. Their school and
domestic status was easily determined later, for many of the boys
lived in the immediate neighborhoods of the ten Settlements which
had undertaken the investigation. The report embodying the
results of the investigation recommended a city ordinance
containing features from the Boston and Buffalo regulations, and
although an ordinance was drawn up and a strenuous effort was
made to bring it to the attention of the aldermen, none of them
would introduce it into the city council without newspaper
backing. We were able to agitate for it again at the annual
meeting of the National Child Labor Committee which was held in
Chicago in 1908, and which was of course reported in papers
throughout the entire country. This meeting also demonstrated
that local measures can sometimes be urged most effectively when
joined to the efforts of a national body. Undoubtedly the best
discussions ever held upon the operation and status of the
Illinois law were those which took place then. The needs of the
Illinois children were regarded in connection with the children
of the nation and advanced health measures for Illinois were
compared with those of other states.
The investigations of Hull-House thus tend to be merged with
those of larger organizations, from the investigation of the
social value of saloons made for the Committee of Fifty in 1896,
to the one on infant mortality in relation to nationality, made
for the American Academy of Science in 1909. This is also true
of Hull-House activities in regard to public movements, some of
which are inaugurated by the residents of other Settlements, as
the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, founded by the
splendid efforts of Dr. Graham Taylor for many years head of
Chicago Commons. All of our recent investigations into housing
have been under the department of investigation of this school
with which several of the Hull-House residents are identified,
quite as our active measures to secure better housing conditions
have been carried on with the City Homes Association and through
the cooperation of one of our residents who several years ago was
appointed a sanitary inspector on the city staff.
Perhaps Dr. Taylor himself offers the best possible example of
the value of Settlement experience to public undertakings, in his
manifold public activities of which one might instance his work
at the moment upon a commission recently appointed by the
governor of Illinois to report upon the best method of Industrial
Insurance or Employer's Liability Acts, and his influence in
securing another to study into the subject of Industrial
Diseases. The actual factory investigation under the latter is
in charge of Dr. Hamilton, of Hull-House, whose long residence in
an industrial neighborhood as well as her scientific attainment,
give her peculiar qualifications for the undertaking.
And so a Settlement is led along from the concrete to the
abstract, as may easily be illustrated. Many years ago a tailors'
union meeting at Hull-House asked our cooperation in tagging the
various parts of a man's coat in such wise as to show the money
paid to the people who had made it; one tag for the cutting and
another for the buttonholes, another for the finishing and so on,
the resulting total to be compared with the selling price of the
coat itself. It quickly became evident that we had no way of
computing how much of this larger balance was spent for salesmen,
commercial travelers, rent and management, and the poor tagged
coat was finally left hanging limply in a closet as if discouraged
with the attempt. But the desire of the manual worker to know the
relation of his own labor to the whole is not only legitimate but
must form the basis of any intelligent action for his improvement.
It was therefore with the hope of reform in the sewing trades
that the Hull-House residents testified before the Federal
Industrial Commission in 1900, and much later with genuine
enthusiasm joined with trades-unionists and other public-spirited
citizens in an industrial exhibit which made a graphic
presentation of the conditions and rewards of labor. The large
casino building in which it was held was filled every day and
evening for two weeks, showing how popular such information is, if
it can be presented graphically. As an illustration of this same
moving from the smaller to the larger, I might instance the
efforts of Miss McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement
and others in urging upon Congress the necessity for a special
investigation into the conditions of women and children in
industry because we had discovered the insuperable difficulties of
smaller investigations, notably one undertaken for the Illinois
Bureau of Labor by Mrs. Van der Vaart of Neighborhood House and by
Miss Breckinridge of the University of Chicago. This
investigation made clear that it was as impossible to detach the
girls working in the stockyards from their sisters in industry as
it was to urge special legislation on their behalf.
In the earlier years of the American Settlements, the residents
were sometimes impatient with the accepted methods of charitable
administration and hoped, through residence in an industrial
neighborhood, to discover more cooperative and advanced methods
of dealing with the problems of poverty which are so dependent
upon industrial maladjustment. But during twenty years, the
Settlements have seen the charitable people, through their very
knowledge of the poor, constantly approach nearer to those
methods formerly designated as radical. The residents, so far
from holding aloof from organized charity, find testimony,
certainly in the National Conferences, that out of the most
persistent and intelligent efforts to alleviate poverty will in
all probability arise the most significant suggestions for
eradicating poverty. In the hearing before a congressional
committee for the establishment of a Children's Bureau, residents
in American Settlements joined their fellow philanthropists in
urging the need of this indispensable instrument for collecting
and disseminating information which would make possible concerted
intelligent action on behalf of children.
Mr. Howells has said that we are all so besotted with our novel
reading that we have lost the power of seeing certain aspects of
life with any sense of reality because we are continually looking
for the possible romance. The description might apply to the
earlier years of the American settlement, but certainly the later
years are filled with discoveries in actual life as romantic as
they are unexpected. If I may illustrate one of these romantic
discoveries from my own experience, I would cite the indications
of an internationalism as sturdy and virile as it is unprecedented
which I have seen in our cosmopolitan neighborhood: when a South
Italian Catholic is forced by the very exigencies of the situation
to make friends with an Austrian Jew representing another
nationality and another religion, both of which cut into all his
most cherished prejudices, he finds it harder to utilize them a
second time and gradually loses them. He thus modifies his
provincialism, for if an old enemy working by his side has turned
into a friend, almost anything may happen. When, therefore, I
became identified with the peace movement both in its
International and National Conventions, I hoped that this
internationalism engendered in the immigrant quarters of American
cities might be recognized as an effective instrument in the cause
of peace. I first set it forth with some misgiving before the
Convention held in Boston in 1904 and it is always a pleasure to
recall the hearty assent given to it by Professor William James.
I have always objected to the phrase "sociological laboratory"
applied to us, because Settlements should be something much more
human and spontaneous than such a phrase connotes, and yet it is
inevitable that the residents should know their own neighborhoods
more thoroughly than any other, and that their experiences there
should affect their convictions.
Years ago I was much entertained by a story told at the Chicago
Woman's Club by one of its ablest members in the discussion
following a paper of mine on "The Outgrowths of Toynbee Hall."
She said that when she was a little girl playing in her mother's
garden, she one day discovered a small toad who seemed to her
very forlorn and lonely, although she did not in the least know
how to comfort him, she reluctantly left him to his fate; later
in the day, quite at the other end of the garden, she found a
large toad, also apparently without family and friends. With a
heart full of tender sympathy, she took a stick and by exercising
infinite patience and some skill, she finally pushed the little
toad through the entire length of the garden into the company of
the big toad, when, to her inexpressible horror and surprise, the
big toad opened his mouth and swallowed the little one. The
moral of the tale was clear applied to people who lived "where
they did not naturally belong," although I protested that was
exactly what we wanted--to be swallowed and digested, to
disappear into the bulk of the people.
Twenty years later I am willing to testify that something of the
sort does take place after years of identification with an
industrial community.
[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 Adrienne Fermoyle.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
[A Celebration of Women Writers]
"Chapter XIV: Civic Cooperation." 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.
310-341.
[Editor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]