CIVIC COOPERATION
One of the first lessons we learned at Hull-House was that private
beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of
the city's disinherited. We also quickly came to realize that
there are certain types of wretchedness from which every private
philanthropy shrinks and which are cared for only in those wards
of the county hospital provided for the wrecks of vicious living
or in the city's isolation hospital for smallpox patients.
I have heard a broken-hearted mother exclaim when her erring
daughter came home at last too broken and diseased to be taken
into the family she had disgraced, "There is no place for her but
the top floor of the County Hospital; they will have to take her
there," and this only after every possible expedient had been
tried or suggested. This aspect of governmental responsibility
was unforgettably borne in upon me during the smallpox epidemic
following the World's Fair, when one of the residents, Mrs.
Kelley, as State Factory Inspector, was much concerned in
discovering and destroying clothing which was being finished in
houses containing unreported cases of smallpox. The deputy most
successful in locating such cases lived at Hull-House during the
epidemic because he did not wish to expose his own family.
Another resident, Miss Lathrop, as a member of the State Board of
Charities, went back and forth to the crowded pest house which
had been hastily constructed on a stretch of prairie west of the
city. As Hull-House was already so exposed, it seemed best for
the special smallpox inspectors from the Board of Health to take
their meals and change their clothing there before they went to
their respective homes. All of these officials had accepted
without question and as implicit in public office the obligation
to carry on the dangerous and difficult undertakings for which
private philanthropy is unfitted, as if the commonalty of
compassion represented by the State was more comprehending than
that of any individual group.
It was as early as our second winter on Halsted Street that one
of the Hull-House residents received an appointment from the Cook
County agent as a county visitor. She reported at the agency
each morning, and all the cases within a radius of ten blocks
from Hull-House were given to her for investigation. This gave
her a legitimate opportunity for knowing the poorest people in
the neighborhood and also for understanding the county method of
outdoor relief. The commissioners were at first dubious of the
value of such a visitor and predicted that a woman would be a
perfect "coal chute" for giving away county supplies, but they
gradually came to depend upon her suggestion and advice.
In 1893 this same resident, Miss Julia C. Lathrop, was appointed
by the governor a member of the Illinois State Board of
Charities. She served in this capacity for two consecutive terms
and was later reappointed to a third term. Perhaps her most
valuable contribution toward the enlargement and reorganization
of the charitable institutions of the State came through her
intimate knowledge of the beneficiaries, and her experience
demonstrated that it is only through long residence among the
poor that an official could have learned to view public
institutions as she did, from the standpoint of the inmates
rather than from that of the managers. Since that early day,
residents of Hull-House have spent much time in working for the
civil service methods of appointment for employees in the county
and State institutions; for the establishment of State colonies
for the care of epileptics; and for a dozen other enterprises
which occupy that borderland between charitable effort and
legislation. In this borderland we cooperate in many civic
enterprises for I think we may claim that Hull-House has always
held its activities lightly, ready to hand them over to whosoever
would carry them on properly.
Miss Starr had early made a collection of framed photographs,
largely of the paintings studied in her art class, which became
the basis of a loan collection first used by the Hull-House
students and later extended to the public schools. It may be
fair to suggest that this effort was the nucleus of the Public
School Art Society which was later formed in the city and of
which Miss Starr was the first president.
In our first two summers we had maintained three baths in the
basement of our own house for the use of the neighborhood, and
they afforded some experience and argument for the erection of
the first public bathhouse in Chicago, which was built on a
neighboring street and opened under the city Board of Health. The
lot upon which it was erected belonged to a friend of Hull-House
who offered it to the city without rent, and this enabled the
city to erect the first public bath from the small appropriation
of ten thousand dollars. Great fear was expressed by the public
authorities that the baths would not be used, and the old story
of the bathtubs in model tenements which had been turned into
coal bins was often quoted to us. We were supplied, however,
with the incontrovertible argument that in our adjacent third
square mile there were in 1892 but three bathtubs and that this
fact was much complained of by many of the tenement-house
dwellers. Our contention was justified by the immediate and
overflowing use of the public baths, as we had before been
sustained in the contention that an immigrant population would
respond to opportunities for reading when the Public Library
Board had established a branch reading room at Hull-House.
We also quickly discovered that nothing brought us so absolutely
into comradeship with our neighbors as mutual and sustained
effort such as the paving of a street, the closing of a gambling
house, or the restoration of a veteran police sergeant.
Several of these earlier attempts at civic cooperation were
undertaken in connection with the Hull-House Men's Club, which
had been organized in the spring of 1893, had been incorporated
under a State charter of its own, and had occupied a club room in
the gymnasium building. This club obtained an early success in
one of the political struggles in the ward and thus fastened upon
itself a specious reputation for political power. It was at last
so torn by the dissensions of two political factions which
attempted to capture it that, although it is still an existing
organization, it has never regained the prestige of its first
five years. Its early political success came in a campaign
Hull-House had instigated against a powerful alderman who has
held office for more than twenty years in the nineteenth ward,
and who, although notoriously corrupt, is still firmly intrenched
among his constituents.
Hull-House has had to do with three campaigns organized against
him. In the first one he was apparently only amused at our
"Sunday School" effort and did little to oppose the election to
the aldermanic office of a member of the Hull-House Men's Club
who thus became his colleague in the city council. When
Hull-House, however, made an effort in the following spring
against the re-election of the alderman himself, we encountered
the most determined and skillful opposition. In these campaigns
we doubtless depended too much upon the idealistic appeal for we
did not yet comprehend the element of reality always brought into
the political struggle in such a neighborhood where politics deal
so directly with getting a job and earning a living.
We soon discovered that approximately one out of every five
voters in the nineteenth ward at that time held a job dependent
upon the good will of the alderman. There were no civil service
rules to interfere, and the unskilled voter swept the street and
dug the sewer, as secure in his position as the more
sophisticated voter who tended a bridge or occupied an office
chair in the city hall. The alderman was even more fortunate in
finding places with the franchise-seeking corporations; it took
us some time to understand why so large a proportion of our
neighbors were street-car employees and why we had such a large
club composed solely of telephone girls. Our powerful alderman
had various methods of entrenching himself. Many people were
indebted to him for his kindly services in the police station and
the justice courts, for in those days Irish constituents easily
broke the peace, and before the establishment of the Juvenile
Court, boys were arrested for very trivial offenses; added to
these were hundreds of constituents indebted to him for personal
kindness, from the peddler who received a free license to the
businessman who had a railroad pass to New York. Our third
campaign against him, when we succeeded in making a serious
impression upon his majority, evoked from his henchmen the same
sort of hostility which a striker so inevitably feels against the
man who would take his job, even sharpened by the sense that the
movement for reform came from an alien source.
Another result of the campaign was an expectation on the part of
our new political friends that Hull-House would perform like
offices for them, and there resulted endless confusion and
misunderstanding because in many cases we could not even attempt
to do what the alderman constantly did with a right good will.
When he protected a law breaker from the legal consequences of
his act, his kindness appeared, not only to himself but to all
beholders, like the deed of a powerful and kindly statesman. When
Hull-House on the other hand insisted that a law must be
enforced, it could but appear like the persecution of the
offender. We were certainly not anxious for consistency nor for
individual achievement, but in a desire to foster a higher
political morality and not to lower our standards, we constantly
clashed with the existing political code. We also unwittingly
stumbled upon a powerful combination of which our alderman was
the political head, with its banking, its ecclesiastical, and its
journalistic representatives, and as we followed up the clue and
naively told all we discovered, we of course laid the foundations
for opposition which has manifested itself in many forms; the
most striking expression of it was an attack upon Hull-House
lasting through weeks and months by a Chicago daily newspaper
which has since ceased publication.
During the third campaign I received many anonymous
letters--those from the men often obscene, those from the women
revealing that curious connection between prostitution and the
lowest type of politics which every city tries in vain to hide.
I had offers from the men in the city prison to vote properly if
released; various communications from lodging-house keepers as to
the prices of the vote they were ready to deliver; everywhere
appeared that animosity which is evoked only when a man feels
that his means of livelihood is threatened.
As I look back, I am reminded of the state of mind of Kipling's
newspapermen who witnessed a volcanic eruption at sea, in which
unbelievable deep-sea creatures were expelled to the surface,
among them an enormous white serpent, blind and smelling of musk,
whose death throes thrashed the sea into a fury. With
professional instinct unimpaired, the journalists carefully
observed the uncanny creature never designed for the eyes of men;
but a few days later, when they found themselves in a comfortable
second-class carriage, traveling from Southampton to London
between trim hedgerows and smug English villages, they concluded
that the experience was too sensational to be put before the
British public, and it became improbable even to themselves.
Many subsequent years of living in kindly neighborhood fashion
with the people of the nineteenth ward has produced upon my
memory the soothing effect of the second-class railroad carriage
and many of these political experiences have not only become
remote but already seem improbable. On the other hand, these
campaigns were not without their rewards; one of them was a
quickened friendship both with the more substantial citizens in
the ward and with a group of fine young voters whose devotion to
Hull-House has never since failed; another was a sense of
identification with public-spirited men throughout the city who
contributed money and time to what they considered a gallant
effort against political corruption. I remember a young
professor from the University of Chicago who with his wife came
to live at Hull-House, traveling the long distance every day
throughout the autumn and winter that he might qualify as a
nineteenth-ward voter in the spring campaign. He served as a
watcher at the polls and it was but a poor reward for his
devotion that he was literally set upon and beaten up, for in
those good old days such things frequently occurred. Many another
case of devotion to our standard so recklessly raised might be
cited, but perhaps more valuable than any of these was the sense
of identification we obtained with the rest of Chicago.
So far as a Settlement can discern and bring to local
consciousness neighborhood needs which are common needs, and can
give vigorous help to the municipal measures through which such
needs shall be met, it fulfills its most valuable function. To
illustrate from our first effort to improve the street paving in
the vicinity, we found that when we had secured the consent of
the majority of the property owners on a given street for a new
paving, the alderman checked the entire plan through his kindly
service to one man who had appealed to him to keep the
assessments down. The street long remained a shocking mass of
wet, dilapidated cedar blocks, where children were sometimes
mired as they floated a surviving block in the water which
speedily filled the holes whence other blocks had been extracted
for fuel. And yet when we were able to demonstrate that the
street paving had thus been reduced into cedar pulp by the
heavily loaded wagons of an adjacent factory, that the expense of
its repaving should be borne from a general fund and not by the
poor property owners, we found that we could all unite in
advocating reform in the method of repaving assessments, and the
alderman himself was obliged to come into such a popular
movement. The Nineteenth Ward Improvement Association which met
at Hull-House during two winters, was the first body of citizens
able to make a real impression upon the local paving situation.
They secured an expert to watch the paving as it went down to be
sure that their half of the paving money was well expended. In
the belief that property values would be thus enhanced, the
common aim brought together the more prosperous people of the
vicinity, somewhat as the Hull-House Cooperative Coal Association
brought together the poorer ones.
I remember that during the second campaign against our alderman,
Governor Pingree of Michigan came to visit at Hull-House. He said
that the stronghold of such a man was not the place in which to
start municipal regeneration; that good aldermen should be elected
from the promising wards first, until a majority of honest men in
the city council should make politics unprofitable for corrupt
men. We replied that it was difficult to divide Chicago into good
and bad wards, but that a new organization called the Municipal
Voters' League was attempting to give to the well-meaning voter in
each ward throughout the city accurate information concerning the
candidates and their relation, past and present, to vital issues.
One of our trustees who was most active in inaugurating this
League always said that his nineteenth-ward experience had
convinced him of the unity of city politics, and that he
constantly used our campaign as a challenge to the unaroused
citizens living in wards less conspicuously corrupt.
Certainly the need for civic cooperation was obvious in many
directions, and in none more strikingly than in that organized
effort which must be carried on unceasingly if young people are to
be protected from the darker and coarser dangers of the city. The
cooperation between Hull-House and the Juvenile Protective
Association came about gradually, and it seems now almost
inevitably. From our earliest days we saw many boys constantly
arrested, and I had a number of most enlightening experiences in
the police station with an Irish lad whose mother upon her
deathbed had begged me "to look after him." We were distressed by
the gangs of very little boys who would sally forth with an
enterprising leader in search of old brass and iron, sometimes
breaking into empty houses for the sake of the faucets or lead
pipe which they would sell for a good price to a junk dealer. With
the money thus obtained they would buy cigarettes and beer or even
candy, which could be conspicuously consumed in the alleys where
they might enjoy the excitement of being seen and suspected by the
"coppers." From the third year of Hull-House, one of the residents
held a semiofficial position in the nearest police station; at
least, the sergeant agreed to give her provisional charge of every
boy and girl under arrest for a trivial offense.
Mrs. Stevens, who performed this work for several years, became
the first probation officer of the Juvenile Court when it was
established in Cook County in 1899. She was the sole probation
officer at first, but at the time of her death, which occurred at
Hull-House in 1900, she was the senior officer of a corps of six.
Her entire experience had fitted her to deal wisely with wayward
children. She had gone into a New England cotton mill at the age
of thirteen, where she had promptly lost the index finger of her
right hand, through "carelessness" she was told, and no one then
seemed to understand that freedom from care was the prerogative
of childhood. Later she became a typesetter and was one of the
first women in America to become a member of the typographical
union, retaining her "card" through all the later years of
editorial work. As the Juvenile Court developed, the committee
of public-spirited citizens who first supplied only Mrs. Stevens'
salary later maintained a corps of twenty-two such officers;
several of these were Hull-House residents who brought to the
house for many years a sad little procession of children
struggling against all sorts of handicaps. When legislation was
secured which placed the probation officers upon the payroll of
the county, it was a challenge to the efficiency of the civil
service method of appointment to obtain by examination men and
women fitted for this delicate human task. As one of five people
asked by the civil service commission to conduct this first
examination for probation officers, I became convinced that we
were but at the beginning of the nonpolitical method of selecting
public servants, but even stiff and unbending as the examination
may be, it is still our hope of political salvation.
In 1907, the Juvenile Court was housed in a model court building
of its own, containing a detention home and equipped with a
competent staff. The committee of citizens largely responsible
for this result thereupon turned their attention to the
conditions which the records of the court indicated had led to
the alarming amount of juvenile delinquency and crime. They
organized the Juvenile Protective Association, whose twenty-two
officers meet weekly at Hull-House with their executive committee
to report what they have found and to discuss city conditions
affecting the lives of children and young people.
The association discovers that there are certain temptations into
which children so habitually fall that it is evident that the
average child cannot withstand them. An overwhelming mass of
data is accumulated showing the need of enforcing existing
legislation and of securing new legislation, but it also
indicates a hundred other directions in which the young people
who so gaily walk our streets, often to their own destruction,
need safeguarding and protection.
The effort of the association to treat the youth of the city with
consideration and understanding has rallied the most unexpected
forces to its standard. Quite as the basic needs of life are
supplied solely by those who make money out of the business, so
the modern city has assumed that the craving for pleasure must be
ministered to only by the sordid. This assumption, however, in a
large measure broke down as soon as the Juvenile Protective
Association courageously put it to the test. After persistent
prosecutions, but also after many friendly interviews, the
Druggists' Association itself prosecutes those of its members who
sell indecent postal cards; the Saloon Keepers' Protective
Association not only declines to protect members who sell liquor
to minors, but now takes drastic action to prevent such sales;
the Retail Grocers' Association forbids the selling of tobacco to
minors; the Association of Department Store Managers not only
increased the vigilance in their waiting rooms by supplying more
matrons, but as a body they have become regular contributors to
the association; the special watchmen in all the railroad yards
agree not to arrest trespassing boys but to report them to the
association; the firms manufacturing moving picture films not
only submit their films to a volunteer inspection committee, but
ask for suggestions in regard to new matter; and the Five-Cent
Theaters arrange for "stunts" which shall deal with the subject
of public health and morals, when the lecturers provided are
entertaining as well as instructive.
It is not difficult to arouse the impulse of protection for the
young, which would doubtless dictate the daily acts of many a
bartender and poolroom keeper if they could only indulge it
without giving their rivals an advantage. When this difficulty
is removed by an even-handed enforcement of the law, that simple
kindliness which the innocent always evoke goes from one to
another like a slowly spreading flame of good will. Doubtless
the most rewarding experience in any such undertaking as that of
the Juvenile Protective Association is the warm and intelligent
cooperation coming from unexpected sources--official and
commercial as well as philanthropic. Upon the suggestion of the
association, social centers have been opened in various parts of
the city, disused buildings turned into recreation rooms, vacant
lots made into gardens, hiking parties organized for country
excursions, bathing beaches established on the lake front, and
public schools opened for social purposes. Through the efforts
of public-spirited citizens a medical clinic and a Psychopathic
Institute have become associated with the Juvenile Court of
Chicago, in addition to which an exhaustive study of
court-records has been completed. To this carefully collected
data concerning the abnormal child, the Juvenile Protective
Association hopes in time to add knowledge of the normal child
who lives under the most adverse city conditions.
It was not without hope that I might be able to forward in the
public school system the solution of some of these problems of
delinquency so dependent upon truancy and ill-adapted education
that I became a member of the Chicago Board of Education in July,
1905. It is impossible to write of the situation as it became
dramatized in half a dozen strong personalities, but the entire
experience was so illuminating as to the difficulties and
limitations of democratic government that it would be unfair in a
chapter on Civic Cooperation not to attempt an outline.
Even the briefest statement, however, necessitates a review of
the preceding few years. For a decade the Chicago school
teachers, or rather a majority of them who were organized into
the Teachers' Federation, had been engaged in a conflict with the
Board of Education both for more adequate salaries and for more
self-direction in the conduct of the schools. In pursuance of
the first object, they had attacked the tax dodger along the
entire line of his defense, from the curbstone to the Supreme
Court. They began with an intricate investigation which uncovered
the fact that in 1899, $235,000,000 of value of public utility
corporations paid nothing in taxes. The Teachers' Federation
brought a suit which was prosecuted through the Supreme Court of
Illinois and resulted in an order entered against the State Board
of Equalization, demanding that it tax the corporations mentioned
in the bill. In spite of the fact that the defendant companies
sought federal aid and obtained an order which restrained the
payment of a portion of the tax, each year since 1900, the
Chicago Board of Education has benefited to the extent of more
than a quarter of a million dollars. Although this result had
been attained through the unaided efforts of the teachers, to
their surprise and indignation their salaries were not increased.
The Teachers' Federation, therefore, brought a suit against the
Board of Education for the advance which had been promised them
three years earlier but never paid. The decision of the lower
court was in their favor, but the Board of Education appealed the
case, and this was the situation when the seven new members
appointed by Mayor Dunne in 1905 took their seats. The
conservative public suspected that these new members were merely
representatives of the Teachers' Federation. This opinion was
founded upon the fact that Judge Dunne had rendered a favorable
decision in the teachers' suit and that the teachers had been
very active in the campaign which had resulted in his election as
mayor of the city. It seemed obvious that the teachers had
entered into politics for the sake of securing their own
representatives on the Board of Education. These suspicions
were, of course, only confirmed when the new board voted to
withdraw the suit of their predecessors from the Appellate Court
and to act upon the decision of the lower court. The teachers,
on the other hand, defended their long effort in the courts, the
State Board of Equalization, and the Legislature against the
charge of "dragging the schools into politics," and declared that
the exposure of the indifference and cupidity of the politicians
was a well-deserved rebuke, and that it was the politicians who
had brought the schools to the verge of financial ruin; they
further insisted that the levy and collection of taxes, tenure of
office, and pensions to civil servants in Chicago were all
entangled with the traction situation, which in their minds at
least had come to be an example of the struggle between the
democratic and plutocratic administration of city affairs. The
new appointees to the School Board represented no concerted
policy of any kind, but were for the most part adherents to the
new education. The teachers, confident that their cause was
identical with the principles advocated by such educators as
Colonel Parker, were therefore sure that the plans of the "new
education" members would of necessity coincide with the plans of
the Teachers' Federation. In one sense the situation was an
epitome of Mayor Dunne's entire administration, which was founded
upon the belief that if those citizens representing social ideals
and reform principles were but appointed to office, public
welfare must be established.
During my tenure of office I many times talked to the officers of
the Teachers' Federation, but I was seldom able to follow their
suggestions and, although I gladly cooperated in their plans for
a better pension system and other matters, only once did I try to
influence the policy of the Federation. When the withheld
salaries were finally paid to the representatives of the
Federation who had brought suit and were divided among the
members who had suffered both financially and professionally
during this long legal struggle, I was most anxious that the
division should voluntarily be extended to all of the teachers
who had experienced a loss of salary although they were not
members of the Federation. It seemed to me a striking
opportunity to refute the charge that the Federation was
self-seeking and to put the whole long effort in the minds of the
public, exactly where it belonged, as one of devoted public
service. But it was doubtless much easier for me to urge this
altruistic policy than it was for those who had borne the heat
and burden of the day to act upon it.
The second object of the Teachers' Federation also entailed much
stress and storm. At the time of the financial stringency, and
largely as a result of it, the Board had made the first
substantial advance in a teacher's salary dependent upon a
so-called promotional examination, half of which was upon
academic subjects entailing a long and severe preparation. The
teachers resented this upon two lines of argument: first, that
the scheme was unprofessional in that the teacher was advanced on
her capacity as a student rather than on her professional
ability; and, second, that it added an intolerable and
unnecessary burden to her already overfull day. The
administration, on the other hand, contended with much justice
that there was a constant danger in a great public school system
that teachers lose pliancy and the open mind, and that many of
them had obviously grown mechanical and indifferent. The
conservative public approved the promotional examinations as the
symbol of an advancing educational standard, and their sympathy
with the superintendent was increased because they continually
resented the affiliation of the Teachers' Federation with the
Chicago Federation of Labor, which had taken place several years
before the election of Mayor Dunne on his traction platform.
This much talked of affiliation between the teachers and the
trades-unionists had been, at least in the first instance, but
one more tactic in the long struggle against the tax-dodging
corporations. The Teachers' Federation had won in their first
skirmish against that public indifference which is generated in
the accumulation of wealth and which has for its nucleus
successful commercial men. When they found themselves in need of
further legislation to keep the offending corporations under
control, they naturally turned for political influence and votes
to the organization representing workingmen. The affiliation had
none of the sinister meaning so often attached to it. The
Teachers' Federation never obtained a charter from the American
Federation of Labor, and its main interest always centered in the
legislative committee.
And yet this statement of the difference between the majority of
the grade-school teachers and the Chicago School Board is totally
inadequate, for the difficulties were stubborn and lay far back
in the long effort of public school administration in America to
free itself from the rule and exploitation of politics. In every
city for many years the politician had secured positions for his
friends as teachers and janitors; he had received a rake-off in
the contract for every new building or coal supply or adoption of
school-books. In the long struggle against this political
corruption, the one remedy continually advocated was the transfer
of authority in all educational matters from the Board to the
superintendent. The one cure for "pull" and corruption was the
authority of the "expert." The rules and records of the Chicago
Board of Education are full of relics of this long struggle
honestly waged by honest men, who unfortunately became content
with the ideals of an "efficient business administration." These
businessmen established an able superintendent with a large
salary, with his tenure of office secured by State law so that he
would not be disturbed by the wrath of the balked politician.
They instituted impersonal examinations for the teachers both as
to entrance into the system and promotion, and they proceeded "to
hold the superintendent responsible" for smooth-running schools.
All this, however, dangerously approximated the commercialistic
ideal of high salaries only for the management with the final
test of a small expense account and a large output.
In this long struggle for a quarter of a century to free the public
schools from political interference, in Chicago at least, the high
wall of defense erected around the school system in order "to keep
the rascals out" unfortunately so restricted the teachers inside
the system that they had no space in which to move about freely and
the more adventurous of them fairly panted for light and air. Any
attempt to lower the wall for the sake of the teachers within was
regarded as giving an opportunity to the politicians without, and
they were often openly accused, with a show of truth, of being in
league with each other. Whenever the Dunne members of the Board
attempted to secure more liberty for the teachers, we were warned
by tales of former difficulties with the politicians, and it seemed
impossible that the struggle so long the focus of attention should
recede into the dullness of the achieved and allow the energy of
the Board to be free for new effort.
The whole situation between the superintendent supported by a
majority of the Board and the Teachers' Federation had become an
epitome of the struggle between efficiency and democracy; on one
side a well-intentioned expression of the bureaucracy necessary in
a large system but which under pressure had become unnecessarily
self-assertive, and on the other side a fairly militant demand for
self-government made in the name of freedom. Both sides inevitably
exaggerated the difficulties of the situation, and both felt that
they were standing by important principles.
I certainly played a most inglorious part in this unnecessary
conflict; I was chairman of the School Management Committee
during one year when a majority of the members seemed to me
exasperatingly conservative, and during another year when they
were frustratingly radical, and I was of course highly
unsatisfactory to both. Certainly a plan to retain the undoubted
benefit of required study for teachers in such wise as to lessen
its burden, and various schemes devised to shift the emphasis
from scholarship to professional work, were mostly impatiently
repudiated by the Teachers' Federation, and when one badly
mutilated plan finally passed the Board, it was most reluctantly
administered by the superintendent.
I at least became convinced that partisans would never tolerate
the use of stepping-stones. They are much too impatient to look
on while their beloved scheme is unstably balanced, and they
would rather see it tumble into the stream at once than to have
it brought to dry land in any such half-hearted fashion. Before
my School Board experience, I thought that life had taught me at
least one hard-earned lesson, that existing arrangements and the
hoped for improvements must be mediated and reconciled to each
other, that the new must be dovetailed into the old as it were,
if it were to endure; but on the School Board I discerned that
all such efforts were looked upon as compromising and unworthy,
by both partisans. In the general disorder and public excitement
resulting from the illegal dismissal of a majority of the "Dunne"
board and their reinstatement by a court decision, I found myself
belonging to neither party. During the months following the
upheaval and the loss of my most vigorous colleagues, under the
regime of men representing the leading Commercial Club of the
city who honestly believed that they were rescuing the schools
from a condition of chaos, I saw one beloved measure after
another withdrawn. Although the new president scrupulously gave
me the floor in the defense of each, it was impossible to
consider them upon their merits in the lurid light which at the
moment enveloped all the plans of the "uplifters." Thus the
building of smaller schoolrooms, such as in New York mechanically
avoid overcrowding, the extension of the truant rooms so
successfully inaugurated, the multiplication of school
playgrounds, and many another cherished plan was thrown out or at
least indefinitely postponed.
The final discrediting of Mayor Dunne's appointees to the School
Board affords a very interesting study in social psychology; the
newspapers had so constantly reflected and intensified the ideals
of a business Board, and had so persistently ridiculed various
administration plans for the municipal ownership of street
railways, that from the beginning any attempt the new Board made
to discuss educational matters only excited their derision and
contempt. Some of these discussions were lengthy and disorderly
and deserved the discipline of ridicule, but others which were
well conducted and in which educational problems were seriously
set forth by men of authority were ridiculed quite as sharply. I
recall the surprise and indignation of a University professor who
had consented to speak at a meeting arranged in the Board rooms,
when next morning his nonpartisan and careful disquisition had
been twisted into the most arrant uplift nonsense and so
connected with a fake newspaper report of a trial marriage
address delivered, not by himself, but by a colleague, that a
leading clergyman of the city, having read the newspaper account,
felt impelled to preach a sermon, calling upon all decent people
to rally against the doctrines which were being taught to the
children by an immoral School Board. As the bewildered professor
had lectured in response to my invitation, I endeavored to find
the animus of the complication, but neither from editor in chief
nor from the reporter could I discover anything more sinister
than that the public expected a good story out of these School
Board "talk fests," and that any man who even momentarily allied
himself with a radical administration must expect to be ridiculed
by those papers which considered the traction policy of the
administration both foolish and dangerous.
As I myself was treated with uniform courtesy by the leading
papers, I may perhaps here record my discouragement over this
complicated difficulty of open discussion, for democratic
government is founded upon the assumption that differing policies
shall be freely discussed and that each party shall have an
opportunity for at least a partisan presentation of its
contentions. This attitude of the newspapers was doubtless
intensified because the Dunne School Board had instituted a
lawsuit challenging the validity of the lease for the school
ground occupied by a newspaper building. This suit has since
been decided in favor of the newspaper, and it may be that in
their resentment they felt justified in doing everything possible
to minimize the prosecuting School Board. I am, however,
inclined to think that the newspapers but reflected an opinion
honestly held by many people, and that their constant and
partisan presentation of this opinion clearly demonstrates one of
the greatest difficulties of governmental administration in a
city grown too large for verbal discussions of public affairs.
It is difficult to close this chapter without a reference to the
efforts made in Chicago to secure the municipal franchise for
women. During two long periods of agitation for a new city
charter, a representative body of women appealed to the public, to
the charter convention, and to the Illinois legislature for this
very reasonable provision. During the campaign when I acted as
chairman of the federation of a hundred women's organizations,
nothing impressed me so forcibly as the fact that the response
came from bodies of women representing the most varied traditions.
We were joined by a church society of hundreds of Lutheran women,
because Scandinavian women had exercised the municipal franchise
since the seventeenth century and had found American cities
strangely conservative; by organizations of working women who had
keenly felt the need of the municipal franchise in order to secure
for their workshops the most rudimentary sanitation and the
consideration which the vote alone obtains for workingmen; by
federations of mothers' meetings, who were interested in clean
milk and the extension of kindergartens; by property-owning women,
who had been powerless to protest against unjust taxation; by
organizations of professional women, of university students, and
of collegiate alumnae; and by women's clubs interested in municipal
reforms. There was a complete absence of the traditional women's
rights clamor, but much impressive testimony from busy and useful
women that they had reached the place where they needed the
franchise in order to carry on their own affairs. A striking
witness as to the need of the ballot, even for the women who are
restricted to the most primitive and traditional activities,
occurred when some Russian women waited upon me to ask whether
under the new charter they could vote for covered markets and so
get rid of the shocking Chicago grime upon all their food; and
when some neighboring Italian women sent me word that they would
certainly vote for public washhouses if they ever had the chance
to vote at all. It was all so human, so spontaneous, and so
direct that it really seemed as if the time must be ripe for
political expression of that public concern on the part of women
which had so long been forced to seek indirection. None of these
busy women wished to take the place of men nor to influence them
in the direction of men's affairs, but they did seek an
opportunity to cooperate directly in civic life through the use of
the ballot in regard to their own affairs.
A Municipal Museum which was established in the Chicago public
library building several years ago, largely through the activity
of a group of women who had served as jurors in the departments
of social economy, of education, and of sanitation in the World's
Fair at St. Louis, showed nothing more clearly than that it is
impossible to divide any of these departments from the political
life of the modern city which is constantly forced to enlarge the
boundary of its activity.
[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 Margaret Sylvia.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
[A Celebration of Women Writers]
"Chapter XV: The Value of Social Clubs." 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. 342-370.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]