THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS
From the early days at Hull-House, social clubs composed of
English speaking American born young people grew apace. So eager
were they for social life that no mistakes in management could
drive them away. I remember one enthusiastic leader who read
aloud to a club a translation of "Antigone," which she had
selected because she believed that the great themes of the Greek
poets were best suited to young people. She came into the club
room one evening in time to hear the president call the restive
members to order with the statement, "You might just as well keep
quiet for she is bound to finish it, and the quicker she gets to
reading, the longer time we'll have for dancing." And yet the
same club leader had the pleasure of lending four copies of the
drama to four of the members, and one young man almost literally
committed the entire play to memory.
On the whole we were much impressed by the great desire for
self-improvement, for study and debate, exhibited by many of the
young men. This very tendency, in fact, brought one of the most
promising of our earlier clubs to an untimely end. The young men in
the club, twenty in number, had grown much irritated by the
frivolity of the girls during their long debates, and had finally
proposed that three of the most "frivolous" be expelled. Pending a
final vote, the three culprits appealed to certain of their friends
who were members of the Hull-House Men's Club, between whom and the
debating young men the incident became the cause of a quarrel so
bitter that at length it led to a shooting. Fortunately the shot
missed fire, or it may have been true that it was "only intended
for a scare," but at any rate, we were all thoroughly frightened by
this manifestation of the hot blood which the defense of woman has
so often evoked. After many efforts to bring about a
reconciliation, the debating club of twenty young men and the
seventeen young women, who either were or pretended to be sober
minded, rented a hall a mile west of Hull-House severing their
connection with us because their ambitious and right-minded efforts
had been unappreciated, basing this on the ground that we had not
urged the expulsion of the so-called "tough" members of the Men's
Club, who had been involved in the difficulty. The seceding club
invited me to the first meeting in their new quarters that I might
present to them my version of the situation and set forth the
incident from the standpoint of Hull-House. The discussion I had
with the young people that evening has always remained with me as
one of the moments of illumination which life in a Settlement so
often affords. In response to my position that a desire to avoid
all that was "tough" meant to walk only in the paths of smug
self-seeking and personal improvement leading straight into the pit
of self-righteousness and petty achievement and was exactly what
the Settlement did not stand for, they contended with much justice
that ambitious young people were obliged for their own reputation,
if not for their own morals, to avoid all connection with that
which bordered on the tough, and that it was quite another matter
for the Hull-House residents who could afford a more generous
judgment. It was in vain I urged that life teaches us nothing more
inevitably than that right and wrong are most confusingly
confounded; that the blackest wrong may be within our own motives,
and that at the best, right will not dazzle us by its radiant
shining and can only be found by exerting patience and
discrimination. They still maintained their wholesome bourgeois
position, which I am now quite ready to admit was most reasonable.
Of course there were many disappointments connected with these
clubs when the rewards of political and commercial life easily
drew the members away from the principles advocated in club
meetings. One of the young men who had been a shining light in
the advocacy of municipal reform deserted in the middle of a
reform campaign because he had been offered a lucrative office in
the city hall; another even after a course of lectures on
business morality, "worked" the club itself to secure orders for
custom-made clothing from samples of cloth he displayed, although
the orders were filled by ready-made suits slightly refitted and
delivered at double their original price. But nevertheless, there
was much to cheer us as we gradually became acquainted with the
daily living of the vigorous young men and women who filled to
overflowing all the social clubs.
We have been much impressed during our twenty years, by the ready
adaptation of city young people to the prosperity arising from
their own increased wages or from the commercial success of their
families. This quick adaptability is the great gift of the city
child, his one reward for the hurried changing life which he has
always led. The working girl has a distinct advantage in the
task of transforming her whole family into the ways and
connections of the prosperous when she works down town and
becomes conversant with the manners and conditions of a
cosmopolitan community. Therefore having lived in a Settlement
twenty years, I see scores of young people who have successfully
established themselves in life, and in my travels in the city and
outside, I am constantly cheered by greetings from the rising
young lawyer, the scholarly rabbi, the successful teacher, the
prosperous young matron buying clothes for blooming children.
"Don't you remember me? I used to belong to a Hull-House club."
I once asked one of these young people, a man who held a good
position on a Chicago daily, what special thing Hull-House had
meant to him, and he promptly replied, "It was the first house I
had ever been in where books and magazines just lay around as if
there were plenty of them in the world. Don't you remember how
much I used to read at that little round table at the back of the
library? To have people regard reading as a reasonable
occupation changed the whole aspect of life to me and I began to
have confidence in what I could do."
Among the young men of the social clubs a large proportion of the
Jewish ones at least obtain the advantages of a higher education.
The parents make every sacrifice to help them through the high
school after which the young men attend universities and
professional schools, largely through their own efforts. From
time to time they come back to us with their honors thick upon
them; I remember one who returned with the prize in oratory from
a contest between several western State universities, proudly
testifying that he had obtained his confidence in our Henry Clay
Club; another came back with a degree from Harvard University
saying that he had made up his mind to go there the summer I read
Royce's "Aspects of Modern Philosophy" with a group of young men
who had challenged my scathing remark that Herbert Spencer was
not the only man who had ventured a solution of the riddles of
the universe. Occasionally one of these learned young folk does
not like to be reminded he once lived in our vicinity, but that
happens rarely, and for the most part they are loyal to us in
much the same spirit as they are to their own families and
traditions. Sometimes they go further and tell us that the
standards of tastes and code of manners which Hull-House has
enabled them to form, have made a very great difference in their
perceptions and estimates of the larger world as well as in their
own reception there. Five out of one club of twenty-five young
men who had held together for eleven years, entered the
University of Chicago but although the rest of the Club called
them the "intellectuals," the old friendships still held.
In addition to these rising young people given to debate and
dramatics, and to the members of the public school alumni
associations which meet in our rooms, there are hundreds of others
who for years have come to Hull-House frankly in search of that
pleasure and recreation which all young things crave and which
those who have spent long hours in a factory or shop demand as a
right. For these young people all sorts of pleasure clubs have
been cherished, and large dancing classes have been organized.
One supreme gayety has come to be an annual event of such
importance that it is talked of from year to year. For six weeks
before St. Patrick's day, a small group of residents put their
best powers of invention and construction into preparation for a
cotillion which is like a pageant in its gayety and vigor. The
parents sit in the gallery, and the mothers appreciate more than
anyone else perhaps, the value of this ball to which an invitation
is so highly prized; although their standards of manners may
differ widely from the conventional, they know full well when the
companionship of the young people is safe and unsullied.
As an illustration of this difference in standard, I may instance
an early Hull-House picnic arranged by a club of young people,
who found at the last moment that the club director could not go
and accepted the offer of the mother of one of the club members
to take charge of them. When they trooped back in the evening,
tired and happy, they displayed a photograph of the group wherein
each man's arm was carefully placed about a girl; no feminine
waist lacked an arm save that of the proud chaperon, who sat in
the middle smiling upon all. Seeing that the photograph somewhat
surprised us, the chaperon stoutly explained, "This may look
queer to you, but there wasn't one thing about that picnic that
wasn't nice," and her statement was a perfectly truthful one.
Although more conventional customs are carefully enforced at our
many parties and festivities, and while the dancing classes are
as highly prized for the opportunity they afford for enforcing
standards as for their ostensible aim, the residents at
Hull-House, in their efforts to provide opportunities for clean
recreation, receive the most valued help from the experienced
wisdom of the older women of the neighborhood. Bowen Hall is
constantly used for dancing parties with soft drinks established
in its foyer. The parties given by the Hull-House clubs are by
invitation and the young people themselves carefully maintain
their standard of entrance so that the most cautious mother may
feel safe when her daughter goes to one of our parties. No club
festivity is permitted without the presence of a director; no
young man under the influence of liquor is allowed; certain types
of dancing often innocently started are strictly prohibited; and
above all, early closing is insisted upon. This standardizing of
pleasure has always seemed an obligation to the residents of
Hull-House, but we are, I hope, saved from that priggishness
which young people so heartily resent, by the Mardi Gras dance
and other festivities which the residents themselves arrange and
successfully carry out.
In spite of our belief that the standards of a ball may be almost
as valuable to those without as to those within, the residents
are constantly concerned for those many young people in the
neighborhood who are too hedonistic to submit to the discipline
of a dancing class or even to the claim of a pleasure club, but
who go about in freebooter fashion to find pleasure wherever it
may be cheaply on sale.
Such young people, well meaning but impatient of control, become
the easy victims of the worst type of public dance halls, and of
even darker places, whose purposes are hidden under music and
dancing. We were thoroughly frightened when we learned that
during the year which ended last December, more than twenty-five
thousand young people under the age of twenty-five passed through
the Juvenile and Municipal Courts of Chicago--approximately one
out of every eighty of the entire population, or one out of every
fifty-two of those under twenty-five years of age. One's heart
aches for these young people caught by the outside glitter of
city gayety, who make such a feverish attempt to snatch it for
themselves. The young people in our clubs are comparatively
safe, but many instances come to the knowledge of Hull-House
residents which make us long for the time when the city, through
more small parks, municipal gymnasiums, and schoolrooms open for
recreation, can guard from disaster these young people who walk
so carelessly on the edge of the pit.
The heedless girls believe that if they lived in big houses and
possessed pianos and jewelry, the coveted social life would come
to them. I know a Bohemian girl who surreptitiously saved her
overtime wages until she had enough money to hire for a week a
room with a piano in it where young men might come to call, as
they could not do in her crowded untidy home. Of course she had
no way of knowing the sort of young men who quickly discover an
unprotected girl.
Another girl of American parentage who had come to Chicago to
seek her fortune, found at the end of a year that sorting
shipping receipts in a dark corner of a warehouse not only failed
to accumulate riches but did not even bring the "attentions"
which her quiet country home afforded. By dint of long sacrifice
she had saved fifteen dollars; with five she bought an imitation
sapphire necklace, and the balance she changed into a ten dollar
bill. The evening her pathetic little snare was set, she walked
home with one of the clerks in the establishment, told him that
she had come into a fortune, and was obliged to wear the heirloom
necklace to insure its safety, permitted him to see that she
carried ten dollars in her glove for carfare, and conducted him
to a handsome Prairie Avenue residence. There she gayly bade him
good-by and ran up the steps shutting herself in the vestibule
from which she did not emerge until the dazzled and bewildered
young man had vanished down the street.
Then there is the ever-recurring difficulty about dress; the
insistence of the young to be gayly bedecked to the utter
consternation of the hardworking parents who are paying for a
house and lot. The Polish girl who stole five dollars from her
employer's till with which to buy a white dress for a church
picnic was turned away from home by her indignant father who
replaced the money to save the family honor, but would harbor no
"thief" in a household of growing children who, in spite of the
sister's revolt, continued to be dressed in dark heavy clothes
through all the hot summer. There are a multitude of working
girls who for hours carry hair ribbons and jewelry in their
pockets or stockings, for they can wear them only during the
journey to and from work. Sometimes this desire to taste
pleasure, to escape into a world of congenial companionship takes
more elaborate forms and often ends disastrously. I recall a
charming young girl, the oldest daughter of a respectable German
family, whom I first saw one spring afternoon issuing from a tall
factory. She wore a blue print gown which so deepened the blue
of her eyes that Wordsworth's line fairly sung itself:
The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze
On some gray rock.
I was grimly reminded of that moment a year later when I heard
the tale of this seventeen-year-old girl, who had worked steadily
in the same factory for four years before she resolved "to see
life." In order not to arouse her parents' suspicions, she
borrowed thirty dollars from one of those loan sharks who require
no security from a pretty girl, so that she might start from home
every morning as if to go to work. For three weeks she spent the
first part of each dearly bought day in a department store where
she lunched and unfortunately made some dubious acquaintances; in
the afternoon she established herself in a theater and sat
contentedly hour after hour watching the endless vaudeville until
the usual time for returning home. At the end of each week she
gave her parents her usual wage, but when her thirty dollars was
exhausted it seemed unendurable that she should return to the
monotony of the factory. In the light of her newly acquired
experience she had learned that possibility which the city ever
holds open to the restless girl.
That more such girls do not come to grief is due to those mothers
who understand the insatiable demand for a good time, and if all
of the mothers did understand, those pathetic statistics which
show that four fifths of all prostitutes are under twenty years
of age would be marvelously changed. We are told that "the will
to live" is aroused in each baby by his mother's irresistible
desire to play with him, the physiological value of joy that a
child is born, and that the high death rate in institutions is
increased by "the discontented babies" whom no one persuades into
living. Something of the same sort is necessary in that second
birth at adolescence. The young people need affection and
understanding each one for himself, if they are to be induced to
live in an inheritance of decorum and safety and to understand
the foundations upon which this orderly world rests. No one
comprehends their needs so sympathetically as those mothers who
iron the flimsy starched finery of their grown-up daughters late
into the night, and who pay for a red velvet parlor set on the
installment plan, although the younger children may sadly need
new shoes. These mothers apparently understand the sharp demand
for social pleasure and do their best to respond to it, although
at the same time they constantly minister to all the physical
needs of an exigent family of little children. We often come to
a realization of the truth of Walt Whitman's statement, that one
of the surest sources of wisdom is the mother of a large family.
It is but natural, perhaps, that the members of the Hull-House
Woman's Club whose prosperity has given them some leisure and a
chance to remove their own families to neighborhoods less full of
temptations, should have offered their assistance in our attempt
to provide recreation for these restless young people. In many
instances their experience in the club itself has enabled them to
perceive these needs. One day a Juvenile Court officer told me
that a woman's club member, who has a large family of her own and
one boy sufficiently difficult, had undertaken to care for a ward
of the Juvenile Court who lived only a block from her house, and
that she had kept him in the path of rectitude for six months. In
reply to my congratulations upon this successful bit of reform to
the club woman herself, she said that she was quite ashamed that
she had not undertaken the task earlier for she had for years
known the boy's mother who scrubbed a downtown office building,
leaving home every evening at five and returning at eleven during
the very time the boy could most easily find opportunities for
wrongdoing. She said that her obligation toward this boy had not
occurred to her until one day when the club members were making
pillowcases for the Detention Home of the Juvenile Court, it
suddenly seemed perfectly obvious that her share in the salvation
of wayward children was to care for this particular boy and she
had asked the Juvenile Court officer to commit him to her. She
invited the boy to her house to supper every day that she might
know just where he was at the crucial moment of twilight, and she
adroitly managed to keep him under her own roof for the evening
if she did not approve of the plans he had made. She concluded
with the remark that it was queer that the sight of the boy
himself hadn't appealed to her, but that the suggestion had come
to her in such a roundabout way.
She was, of course, reflecting upon a common trait in human
nature,--that we much more easily see the duty at hand when we
see it in relation to the social duty of which it is a part.
When she knew that an effort was being made throughout all the
large cities in the United States to reclaim the wayward boy, to
provide him with reasonable amusement, to give him his chance for
growth and development, and when she became ready to take her
share in that movement, she suddenly saw the concrete case which
she had not recognized before.
We are slowly learning that social advance depends quite as much
upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of
duty, and of this one could cite many illustrations. I was at one
time chairman of the Child Labor Committee in the General
Federation of Woman's Clubs, which sent out a schedule asking each
club in the United States to report as nearly as possible all the
working children under fourteen living in its vicinity. A Florida
club filled out the schedule with an astonishing number of Cuban
children who were at work in sugar mills, and the club members
registered a complaint that our committee had sent the schedule
too late, for if they had realized the conditions earlier, they
might have presented a bill to the legislature which had now
adjourned. Of course the children had been working in the sugar
mills for years, and had probably gone back and forth under the
very eyes of the club women, but the women had never seen them,
much less felt any obligation to protect them, until they joined a
club, and the club joined a Federation, and the Federation
appointed a Child Labor Committee who sent them a schedule. With
their quickened perceptions they then saw the rescue of these
familiar children in the light of a social obligation. Through
some such experiences the members of the Hull-House Woman's Club
have obtained the power of seeing the concrete through the general
and have entered into various undertakings.
Very early in its history the club formed what was called "A
Social Extension Committee." Once a month this committee gives
parties to people in the neighborhood who for any reason seem
forlorn and without much social pleasure. One evening they
invited only Italian women, thereby crossing a distinct social
"gulf," for there certainly exists as great a sense of social
difference between the prosperous Irish-American women and the
South-Italian peasants as between any two sets of people in the
city of Chicago. The Italian women, who were almost eastern in
their habits, all stayed at home and sent their husbands, and the
social extension committee entered the drawing room to find it
occupied by rows of Italian workingmen, who seemed to prefer to
sit in chairs along the wall. They were quite ready to be
"socially extended," but plainly puzzled as to what it was all
about. The evening finally developed into a very successful
party, not so much because the committee were equal to it, as
because the Italian men rose to the occasion.
Untiring pairs of them danced the tarantella; they sang
Neapolitan songs; one of them performed some of those wonderful
sleight-of-hand tricks so often seen on the streets of Naples;
they explained the coral finger of St. Januarius which they wore;
they politely ate the strange American refreshments; and when the
evening was over, one of the committee said to me, "Do you know I
am ashamed of the way I have always talked about 'dagos,' they
are quite like other people, only one must take a little more
pains with them. I have been nagging my husband to move off M
Street because they are moving in, but I am going to try staying
awhile and see if I can make a real acquaintance with some of
them." To my mind at that moment the speaker had passed from the
region of the uncultivated person into the possibilities of the
cultivated person. The former is bounded by a narrow outlook on
life, unable to overcome differences of dress and habit, and his
interests are slowly contracting within a circumscribed area;
while the latter constantly tends to be more a citizen of the
world because of his growing understanding of all kinds of people
with their varying experiences. We send our young people to
Europe that they may lose their provincialism and be able to
judge their fellows by a more universal test, as we send them to
college that they may attain the cultural background and a larger
outlook; all of these it is possible to acquire in other ways, as
this member of the woman's club had discovered for herself.
This social extension committee under the leadership of an
ex-president of the Club, a Hull-House resident with a wide
acquaintance, also discover many of those lonely people of which
every city contains so large a number. We are only slowly
apprehending the very real danger to the individual who fails to
establish some sort of genuine relation with the people who
surround him. We are all more or less familiar with the results
of isolation in rural districts; the Bronte sisters have
portrayed the hideous immorality and savagery of the remote
dwellers on the bleak moorlands of northern England; Miss Wilkins
has written of the overdeveloped will of the solitary New
Englander; but tales still wait to be told of the isolated city
dweller. In addition to the lonely young man recently come to
town, and the country family who have not yet made their
connections, are many other people who, because of temperament or
from an estimate of themselves which will not permit them to make
friends with the "people around here," or who, because they are
victims to a combination of circumstances, lead a life as lonely
and untouched by the city about them as if they were in remote
country districts. The very fact that it requires an effort to
preserve isolation from the tenement-house life which flows all
about them, makes the character stiffer and harsher than mere
country solitude could do.
Many instances of this come into my mind; the faded, ladylike
hairdresser, who came and went to her work for twenty years,
carefully concealing her dwelling place from the "other people in
the shop," moving whenever they seemed too curious about it, and
priding herself that no neighbor had ever "stepped inside her
door," and yet when discovered through an asthma which forced her
to crave friendly offices, she was most responsive and even gay
in a social atmosphere. Another woman made a long effort to
conceal the poverty resulting from her husband's inveterate
gambling and to secure for her children the educational
advantages to which her family had always been accustomed. Her
five children, who are now university graduates, do not realize
how hard and solitary was her early married life when we first
knew her, and she was beginning to regret the isolation in which
her children were being reared, for she saw that their lack of
early companionship would always cripple their power to make
friends. She was glad to avail herself of the social resources
of Hull-House for them, and at last even for herself.
The leader of the social extension committee has also been able,
through her connection with the vacant lot garden movement in
Chicago, to maintain a most flourishing "friendly club" largely
composed of people who cultivate these garden plots. During the
club evening at least, they regain something of the ease of the
man who is being estimated by the bushels per acre of potatoes he
has raised, and not by that flimsy city judgment so often based
upon store clothes. Their jollity and enthusiasm are unbounded,
expressing itself in clog dances and rousing old songs often in
sharp contrast to the overworked, worn aspects of the members.
Of course there are surprising possibilities discovered through
other clubs, in one of Greek women or in the "circolo Italiano,"
for a social club often affords a sheltered space in which the
gentler social usages may be exercised, as the more vigorous
clubs afford a point of departure into larger social concerns.
The experiences of the Hull-House Woman's Club constantly react
upon the family life of the members. Their husbands come with
them to the annual midwinter reception, to club concerts and
entertainments; the little children come to the May party, with
its dancing and games; the older children, to the day in June
when prizes are given to those sons and daughters of the members
who present a good school record as graduates either from the
eighth grade or from a high school.
It seemed, therefore, but a fit recognition of their efforts when
the president of the club erected a building planned especially
for their needs, with their own library and a hall large enough
for their various social undertakings, although of course Bowen
Hall is constantly put to many other uses.
It was under the leadership of this same able president that the
club achieved its wider purposes and took its place with the
other forces for city betterment. The club had begun, as nearly
all women's clubs do, upon the basis of self-improvement,
although the foundations for this later development had been laid
by one of their earliest presidents, who was the first probation
officer of the Juvenile Court, and who had so shared her
experiences with the club that each member felt the truth as well
as the pathos of the lines inscribed on her memorial tablet
erected in their club library:-
"As more exposed to suffering and distress
Thence also more alive to tenderness."
Each woman had discovered opportunities in her own experience for
this same tender understanding, and under its succeeding
president, Mrs. Pelham, in its determination to be of use to the
needy and distressed, the club developed many philanthropic
undertakings from the humble beginnings of a linen chest kept
constantly filled with clothing for the sick and poor. It
required, however, an adequate knowledge of adverse city
conditions so productive of juvenile delinquency and a sympathy
which could enkindle itself in many others of divers faiths and
training, to arouse the club to its finest public spirit. This
was done by a later president, Mrs. Bowen, who, as head of the
Juvenile Protective Association, had learned that the moralized
energy of a group is best fitted to cope with the complicated
problems of a city; but it required ability of an unusual order
to evoke a sense of social obligation from the very knowledge of
adverse city conditions which the club members possessed, and to
connect it with the many civic and philanthropic organizations of
the city in such wise as to make it socially useful. This
financial and representative connection with outside
organizations, is valuable to the club only as it expresses its
sympathy and kindliness at the same time in concrete form. A
group of members who lunch with Mrs. Bowen each week at
Hull-House discuss, not only topics of public interest, sometimes
with experts whom they have long known through their mutual
undertakings, but also their own club affairs in the light of
this larger knowledge.
Thus the value of social clubs broadens out in one's mind to an
instrument of companionship through which many may be led from a
sense of isolation to one of civic responsibility, even as another
type of club provides recreational facilities for those who have
had only meaningless excitements, or, as a third type, opens new
and interesting vistas of life to those who are ambitious.
The entire organization of the social life at Hull-House, while it
has been fostered and directed by residents and others, has been
largely pushed and vitalized from within by the club members
themselves. Sir Walter Besant once told me that Hull-House stood
in his mind more nearly for the ideal of the "Palace of Delight"
than did the "London People's Palace" because we had depended upon
the social resources of the people using it. He begged me not to
allow Hull-House to become too educational. He believed it much
easier to develop a polytechnic institute than a large recreational
center, but he doubted whether the former was as useful.
The social clubs form a basis of acquaintanceship for many people
living in other parts of the city. Through friendly relations
with individuals, which is perhaps the sanest method of approach,
they are thus brought into contact, many of them for the first
time, with the industrial and social problems challenging the
moral resources of our contemporary life. During our twenty
years hundreds of these non-residents have directed clubs and
classes, and have increased the number of Chicago citizens who
are conversant with adverse social conditions and conscious that
only by the unceasing devotion of each, according to his
strength, shall the compulsions and hardships, the stupidities
and cruelties of life be overcome. The number of people thus
informed is constantly increasing in all our American cities, and
they may in time remove the reproach of social neglect and
indifference which has so long rested upon the citizens of the
new world. I recall the experience of an Englishman who, not
only because he was a member of the Queen's Cabinet and bore a
title, but also because he was an able statesman, was entertained
with great enthusiasm by the leading citizens of Chicago. At a
large dinner party he asked the lady sitting next to him what our
tenement-house legislation was in regard to the cubic feet of air
required for each occupant of a tenement bedroom; upon her
disclaiming any knowledge of the subject, the inquiry was put to
all the diners at the long table, all of whom showed surprise
that they should be expected to possess this information. In
telling me the incident afterward, the English guest said that
such indifference could not have been found among the leading
citizens of London, whose public spirit had been aroused to
provide such housing conditions as should protect tenement
dwellers at least from wanton loss of vitality and lowered
industrial efficiency. When I met the same Englishman in London
five years afterward, he immediately asked me whether Chicago
citizens were still so indifferent to the conditions of the poor
that they took no interest in their proper housing. I was quick
with that defense which an American is obliged to use so often in
Europe, that our very democracy so long presupposed that each
citizen could care for himself that we are slow to develop a
sense of social obligation. He smiled at the familiar phrases
and was still inclined to attribute our indifference to sheer
ignorance of social conditions.
The entire social development of Hull-House is so unlike what I
predicted twenty years ago, that I venture to quote from that
ancient writing as an end to this chapter.
The social organism has broken down through large
districts of our great cities. Many of the people living
there are very poor, the majority of them without leisure
or energy for anything but the gain of subsistence.
They live for the moment side by side, many of them
without knowledge of each other, without fellowship,
without local tradition or public spirit, without social
organization of any kind. Practically nothing is done to
remedy this. The people who might do it, who have the
social tact and training, the large houses, and the
traditions and customs of hospitality, live in other parts
of the city. The club houses, libraries, galleries, and
semi-public conveniences for social life are also blocks
away. We find workingmen organized into armies of
producers because men of executive ability and business
sagacity have found it to their interests thus to organize
them. But these workingmen are not organized socially;
although lodging in crowded tenement houses, they are
living without a corresponding social contact. The chaos
is as great as it would be were they working in huge
factories without foremen or superintendent. Their ideas
and resources are cramped, and the desire for higher
social pleasure becomes extinct. They have no share in
the traditions and social energy which make for progress.
Too often their only place of meeting is a saloon, their
only host a bartender; a local demagogue forms their
public opinion. Men of ability and refinement, of social
power and university cultivation, stay away from them.
Personally, I believe the men who lose most are those who
thus stay away. But the paradox is here; when cultivated
people do stay away from a certain portion of the
population, when all social advantages are persistently
withheld, it may be for years, the result itself is
pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument, for the
continued withholding.
It is constantly said that because the masses have never
had social advantages, they do want them, that they are
heavy and dull, and that it will take political or
philanthropic machinery to change them. This divides a
city into rich and poor; into the favored, who express
their sense of the social obligation by gifts of money,
and into the unfavored, who express it by clamoring for a
"share"--both of them actuated by a vague sense of justice.
This division of the city would be more justifiable,
however, if the people who thus isolate themselves on
certain streets and use their social ability for each
other, gained enough thereby and added sufficient to the
sum total of social progress to justify the withholding of
the pleasures and results of that progress from so many
people who ought to have them. But they cannot accomplish
this for the social spirit discharges itself in many
forms, and no one form is adequate to its total
expression.
[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, proof-reading, and html layout of this chapter were the
work of volunteer Adrienne Fermoyle.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]
[A Celebration of Women Writers]
"Chapter XVI: Arts at Hull-House." 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.
371-400.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]