sat dreaming under the Norway pines which had grown from seeds that
her father had scattered in his early, pioneer days, she seemed to
hear something of "the still, sad music of humanity" in the voice of
the wind in the tree-tops and in the harmony of her life of varied
interests. For she saw with the inward eye of the heart, and felt the
throb of all life in each vital experience that was hers. It would be
impossible to live apart in pleasant places, enjoying beauty which
others might not share. She must live in the midst of the crowded ways,
and bring to the poor, stifled little houses an ideal of healthier
living. She would study medicine and go as a doctor to the forlorn,
dirty children; but first there would be many things to learn.
It was her dream to go to Smith College, but her father believed that a
small college near her home better fitted one for the life to which she
belonged.
"My daughter is also a daughter of Illinois," he said, "and Rockford
College is her proper place. Afterward she may go east and to Europe in
order to gain a knowledge of what the world beyond us can give, and so
get a fuller appreciation of what life at home is and may be."
Jane Addams went, therefore, to the Illinois college, "The Mt. Holyoke
of the West," a college famed for its earnest, missionary spirit. The
serious temper of her class was reflected in their motto which was the
Anglo-Saxon word for lady--_hláfdige_ (bread-kneader), translated as
_bread-giver_; and the poppy was selected for the class flower, "because
poppies grow among the wheat, as if Nature knew that wherever there was
hunger that needed food there would be pain that needed relief."
The study in which she took the keenest interest was history,--"the
human tale of this wide world,"--but even at the time of her greatest
enthusiasm she realized that while knowledge comes from the records of
the past, wisdom comes from a right understanding of the actual life of
the present.
After receiving from her Alma Mater the degree of B. A., she entered
the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia to prepare for real work in
a real world, but the old spinal trouble soon brought that chapter to
a close. After some months in Doctor Weir Mitchell's hospital, and a
longer time of invalidism, she agreed to follow her doctor's pleasant
prescription of two years in Europe.
"When I returned I decided to give up my medical course," said Jane
Addams, "partly because I had no real aptitude for scientific work, and
partly because I discovered that there were other genuine reasons for
living among the poor than that of practicing medicine upon them."
While in London Miss Addams saw much of the life of the great city from
the top of an omnibus. Once she was taken with a number of tourists to
see the spectacle of the Saturday night auction of fruits and vegetables
to the poor of the East Side, and the lurid picture blotted out all the
picturesque impressions, full of pleasant human interest and historic
association, that she had been eagerly enjoying during this first visit
to London town. Always afterwards, when she closed her eyes, she could
see the scene; it seemed as if it would never leave her. In the flare of
the gas-light, which made weird and spectral the motley, jostling crowd
and touched the black shadows it created into a grotesque semblance of
life, she saw wrinkled women, desperate-looking men, and pale children
vying with each other to secure with their farthings and ha'pennies the
vegetables held up by a hoarse, red-faced auctioneer.
One haggard youth sat on the curb, hungrily devouring the cabbage that
he had succeeded in bidding in. Her sensation-loving companions on the
bus stared with mingled pity and disgust; but the girl who saw what she
looked on with the inward eye of the heart turned away her face. The
poverty that she had before seen had not prepared her for wretchedness
like this.
"For the following weeks," she said, "I went about London furtively,
afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose this
hideous human need and suffering. In time, nothing of the great city
seemed real save the misery of its East End."
[Illustration: Polk Street façade of Hull-House buildings]
[Illustration: A corner of the Boys' Library at Hull-House]
This first impression of London's poverty was, of course, not only
lurid, but quite unfair. She knew nothing of the earnest workers who
were devoting their lives to the problem of giving the right kind of
help to those who, through weakness, ignorance, or misfortune, were
not able to help themselves.
When, five years later, she visited Toynbee Hall, she saw effective
work of the kind she had dimly dreamed of ever since, as a little
girl, she had wanted to build a beautiful big house among the ugly
little ones in the city. Here in the heart of the Whitechapel district,
the most evil and unhappy section of London's East End, a group of
optimistic, large-hearted young men, who believed that advantages mean
responsibilities, had come to live and work. While trying to share what
good birth, breeding, and education had given them with those who had
been shut away from every chance for wholesome living, they believed
that they in turn might learn from their humble neighbors much that
universities and books cannot teach.
"I have spent too much time in vague preparation for I knew not what,"
said Jane Addams. "At last I see a way to begin to live in a really real
world, and to learn to do by doing."
And so Hull-House was born. In the heart of the industrial section of
Chicago, where workers of thirty-six different nations live closely
herded together, Miss Addams found surviving a solidly built house with
large halls, open fireplaces, and friendly piazzas. This she secured,
repaired, and adapted to the needs of her work, naming it Hull-House
from its original owner, one of Chicago's early citizens.
"But we must not forget that the house is only the outward sign," said
Miss Addams. "The real thing is the work. 'Labor is the house that love
lives in,' and as we work together we shall come to understand each
other and learn from each other."
"What are you going to put in your house for your interesting
experiment?" Miss Addams was asked.
"Just what I should want in my home anywhere--even in your perfectly
correct neighborhood," she replied with a smile.
You can imagine the beautiful, restful place it was, with everything in
keeping with the fine old house. On every side were pictures and other
interesting things that she had gathered in her travels.
Of course, Miss Addams was not alone in her work. Her friend, Ellen
Gates Starr, was with her from the beginning. Miss Julia Lathrop, who
is now the head of the Children's Bureau in Washington, was another
fellow-worker. Soon many volunteers came eagerly forward, some to teach
the kindergarten, others to take charge of classes and clubs of various
kinds. They began by teaching different kinds of hand-work, which then
had no place in the public schools.
"One little chap, who was brought into the Juvenile Court the other day
for breaking a window, confessed to the judge that he had thrown the
stone 'a-purpose to get pinched,' so they would send him to a school
where 'they learn a fellow to make things,'" Miss Addams was told.
Classes in woodwork, basketry, sewing, weaving, and other handicrafts
were eagerly patronized. There were also evening clubs where boys and
girls who had early left school to work in factories could learn to make
things of practical value or listen to reading and the spirited telling
of the great world-stories.
One day Miss Addams met a small newsboy as he hastily left the house,
vainly trying to keep back signs of grief. "There is no use of coming
here any more," he said gruffly; "Prince Roland is dead!"
The evening classes were also social clubs, where the children who
seemed to be growing dull and unfeeling like the turning wheels among
which they spent their days could relax their souls and bodies in free,
happy companionship and get a taste of natural living.
"Young people need pleasure as truly as they need food and air," said
Miss Addams. "When I see the throngs of factory-girls on our streets in
the evening, it seems to me that the pitiless city sees in them just two
possibilities: first, the chance to use their tender labor-power by day,
and then the chance to take from them their little earnings at night by
appealing to their need of pleasure."
One of the new buildings that was early added to the original Hull-House
was a gymnasium, which provided opportunities for swimming, basket-ball,
and dancing.
"We have swell times in our Hull-House club," boasted black-eyed
Angelina. "Our floor in the gym puts it all over the old dancehalls for
a jolly good hop,--no saloon next door with all that crowd, good classy
music, and the right sort of girls and fellows. Then sometimes our club
has a real party in the coffeehouse. That's what I call a fine, cozy
time; makes a girl glad she's living."
Hull-House also puts within the reach of many the things which their
active minds crave, and opens the way to a new life and success in the
world.
"Don't you remember me?" a rising young newspaper man once said to Miss
Addams. "I used to belong to a Hull-House club."
"Tell me what Hull-House did for you that really helped," she took
occasion to ask.
"It was the first house I had ever been in," he replied promptly, "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?"
Some good people who visit the Settlement in a patronizing mood are
surprised to discover that many of "these working-girls" have a taste
for what is fine. Miss Addams likes to tell them about the intelligent
group who followed the reading of George Eliot's "Romola" with
unflagging interest.
"The club was held in our dining-room," she said to one incredulous
visitor, "and two of the girls came early regularly to help wash the
dishes and arrange the photographs of Florence on the table. Do you
know," she added, looking her prosperous guest quietly in the eyes,
"that the young woman of whom you were inquiring about 'these people'
is one of our neighborhood girls? Those who live in these dingy streets
because they are poor and must live near their work are not a different
order of beings. Don't forget what Lincoln said, 'God must love the
common people--He made so many of them.' You have only to live at
Hull-House a while to learn how true it is that God loves them."
"Nothing has ever meant more real inspiration to me," said a student of
sociology from the university, who had spent a year in the Settlement,
"than the way the poor help each other. A woman who supports three
children by scrubbing will share her breakfast with the people in the
next tenement because she has heard that they are 'hard up'; a man who
has been out of work has a month's rent paid by a young chap in the
stock-yards who boarded with him last year; a Swedish girl works in
the laundry for her German neighbor to let her stay home with her sick
baby--and so it goes."
"Our people have, too, many other hardships besides the frequent lack
of food and fuel," said Miss Addams. "There are other hungers. Do you
know what it means for the Italian peasant, used to an outdoor life in
a sunny, easy-going land, to adapt himself to the ways of America? It
is a very dark, shut-in Chicago that many of them know. At one of the
receptions here an Italian woman who was delighted with our red roses
was also surprised that they could be 'brought so fresh all the way from
Italy.' She would not believe that roses grew in Chicago, because she
had lived here six years and had never seen any. One always saw roses
in Italy. Think of it! She had lived for six years within ten blocks of
florists' shops, but had never seen one!"
"Yes," said Miss Starr, "they lose the beauties and joys of their old
homes before they learn what the new can give. When we had our first art
exhibit, an Italian said that he didn't know that Americans cared for
anything but dollars--that looking at pictures was something people did
only in Italy."
A Greek was overjoyed at seeing a photograph of the Acropolis at
Hull-House. He said that before he came to America he had prepared a
book of pictures in color of Athens, because he thought that people
in the new country would like to see them. At his stand near a big
railroad-station he had tried to talk to some of those who stopped
to buy about "the glory that was Greece," but he had concluded that
Americans cared for nothing but fruit and the correct change!
At Hull-House the Greeks, Italians, Poles, and Germans not only find
pictures which quicken early memories and affections, but they can give
plays of their own country and people. The "Ajax" and "Electra" of
Sophocles have been presented by Greeks, who felt that they were showing
ignorant Americans the majesty of the classic drama. Thanksgiving,
Christmas, and other holidays are celebrated by plays and pageants. Nor
are the great days of other lands forgotten. Garibaldi and Mazzini, who
fought for liberty in Italy, are honored with Washington and Lincoln.
Old and young alike take part in the dramatic events. A blind patriarch,
who appeared in Longfellow's "Golden Legend," which was presented one
Christmas, spoke to Miss Addams of his great joy in the work.
"Kind Heart," he said (that was his name for her),--"Kind Heart, it
seems to me that I have been waiting all my life to hear some of these
things said. I am glad we had so many performances, for I think I can
remember them to the end. It is getting very hard for me to listen to
reading, but the different voices and all made this very plain."
The music classes and choruses give much joy to the people, and here
it seems possible to bring together in a common feeling those widely
separated by tradition and custom. Music is the universal language of
the heart. Bohemian and Polish women sing their tender and stirring
folk-songs. The voices of men and women of many lands mingle in
Schubert's lovely melodies and in the mighty choruses of Handel.
As Miss Addams went about among her neighbors she longed to lead them to
a perception of the relation between the present and the past. If only
the young, who were impatiently breaking away from all the old country
traditions, could be made to appreciate what their parents held dear; if
the fathers and mothers could at the same time understand the complex
new order in which their children were struggling to hold their own.
When, one day, she saw an old Italian woman spinning with distaff and
spindle, an idea came to her. A Labor Museum, that would show the growth
of industries in every country, from the simplest processes to the
elaborate machinery of modern times, might serve the purpose.
The working-out of her plan far exceeded her wildest dream. Russians,
Germans, and Italians happily foregathered to demonstrate and compare
methods of textile work with which they were familiar. Other activities
proved equally interesting. The lectures given among the various
exhibits met with a warm welcome. Factory workers, who had previously
fought shy of everything "improving," came because they said these
lectures were "getting next to the stuff you work with all the time."
Hull-House has worked not only _with_ the people but _for_ them, by
trying to secure laws that will improve the conditions under which they
labor and live. The following incident will speak for the fight that
Miss Addams has made against such evils as child labor and sweat-shop
work.
The representatives of a group of manufacturers waited upon her and
promised that if she would "drop all this nonsense about a sweat-shop
bill of which she knew nothing," certain business men would give fifty
thousand dollars for her Settlement. The steady look which the lady of
Hull-House gave the spokesman made him wish that some one else had come
with the offer of the bribe.
"We have no ambition," said Miss Addams, "to make Hull-House the largest
institution in Chicago; but we are trying to protect our neighbors from
evil conditions; and if to do that, the destruction of our Settlement
should be necessary, we would gladly sing a Te Deum on its ruins."
The girl who saw what she looked on with "the eye of the heart," had
become a leader in the life and the reforms of her time. "On the whole,"
one writer has said of her, "the reach of this woman's sympathy and
understanding is beyond all comparison wider in its span--comprehending
all kinds of people--than that of any other living person."
Jane Addams has won her great influence with people by the simple means
of working with them. Her life and the true Hull-House--the work itself,
not the buildings which shelter it--give meaning to the saying that
"Labor is the house that love lives in."
THE END
Transcriber's Notes:
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
This book contains double quotation marks within double quotation marks.
End of Project Gutenberg's Heroines of Service, by Mary Rosetta Parkman