Twenty Years at Hull House

In 1892, Jane Addams was asked to deliver a lecture at a summer school in Plymouth, Massachusetts held by the Ethical Culture Societies, which invited several representatives of the Settlement movement to discuss Philanthropy and Social Progress. Addams reproduces part of the lecture she gave that summer, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” to convey early enthusiasm and motives. In her paper, Addams describes the fast-growing number of educated young people in America who do not have a proper outlet for their active faculties. They feel useless with “a fatal want of harmony between their theory and their lives, a lack of coordination between thought and action” (91). These young men and women long “to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal” (92) of the universal uplift of society. Addams particularly notes that the young women, who have received the advantages of a college education and European travel and possess the desire to alleviate suffering, are restricted by their parents to inaction. Addams mentions that these sincere, undirected lives seem as pitiful to her as the lives of the destitute masses. She states that Mr. Barnett, who founded Toynbee Hall, the first Settlement in England, recognized the need in the young Oxford and Cambridge male students for an outlet. The necessity for the Settlement movement in England was greater because of its rigid class distinctions and more constrained education. However, Addams affirms that Americans are increasingly feeling the necessity for action in Settlements.

Another American motive for social service is to express the spirit of Christ in helping the sick, the aged, and the poor. Addams sees a renaissance of early Christian humanitarianism in America; the Settlement movement is only one manifestation of Christianity in society. Addams reiterates three motives that led to the opening of Hull-House: “first, the desire to interpret democracy in social terms; secondly, the impulse […] to aid in the race progress; and thirdly, the Christian movement toward humanitarianism” (98). The tolerant, hospitable Settlement is an experimental effort to help solve the social and industrial problems caused by modern, urban conditions. The experiment tries to relieve one end of society’s overaccumulation and the other end of society’s destitution in terms of social and educational privileges. The Settlement residents promise to fulfill the duties of good citizenship. Their philosophy is grounded on the idea of the unity of the human race: no individual can have lasting improvement of her own condition without the improvement of humanity’s condition.

The early American Settlement movement emphasized a demanding standard for philanthropic activities, requiring that each new undertaking be preceded by a careful collection of facts. Hull-House embodied this standard in the opening of a coffee-house that began as a public kitchen. An investigation of sweatshops had found that the sewing women did not focus on the nutritious feeding of their families because their work enforced long hours and low wages, and they relied on canned goods for meals. Cheaper cuts of meat and fresh vegetables, if cooked slowly, would have more nutritious value. To help the women acquire the necessary skills and resources to improve their families’ nutrition, the philanthropists established public kitchens where the women could work under scientific training and proper supervision. Consequently, a Hull-House resident trained at the New England public kitchen in Boston and returned to organize such a kitchen in Hull-House. Addams did not anticipate the difficulties associated with ethnic diversity and the tastes of people who preferred convenience foods over expensive but more nutritious options. However, Addams soon learned that the Hull-House coffeehouse had social value. Until then, neighborhood saloon halls were the only locations where the West Side’s immigrant community could hold its gatherings. The Hull-House coffeehouse became a social center for the neighborhood, and the experience helped Addams appreciate the need to keep an open mind.

Addams hoped the power of cooperation would help the locals create sustainable resources for the community. Hull-House started a Cooperative Coal Association for workers to run a coal-yard to supply their needs for fuel. However, the experiment was unsuccessful because the workers shared the coal freely and did not collect enough money to support the Association. Another Hull-House cooperative experiment was more successful, perhaps because it was more spontaneous. It emerged out of the need for working girls at a shoe factory to have a place to board in the event of a strike that might temporarily halt their wages. The Jane Club was the only successful cooperative founded and managed by women, according to the head of the U.S. Department of Labor at that time. Hull-House built a new clubhouse for the Jane Club, but it had to refuse one major donation because it was “tainted money,” offered by a businessman notorious for underpaying female laborers. Addams found the morality of the issue since it was possible for good to come from such contributions. In the end, her conscience prevailed, and she refused the donation. Although there were many unsuccessful cooperation attempts in Chicago in the 1890s, Addams believed in the possibility of the cooperative ideal in which people stopped wasting their strength in individual competition and pooled their resources to create a better society. She lectured at New Harmony, Indiana, having been inspired early by the story of Robert Owens.

Addams was surprised by the immigrants’ different perspectives on morality and crime. She recounts the story of an Italian immigrant family who visited their father in prison, but did not perceive him as a criminal, only as someone who had gotten upset over a card game and killed his opponent. Young immigrant girls who had turned to prostitution to earn money were often unperturbed by the perceived immorality of the business. Additionally disturbing to Addams was the way in which these “fallen girls,” even victims of the “white slave traffic,” were stigmatized and rejected by their families, churches, and the parents of the members of Hull-House’s social clubs.

Addams’s memories of the first years at Hull-House are blurred because of her fatigue during the ceaseless activity: little children attended kindergarten in the mornings, older children came for afternoon clubs, and adults arrived for educational and social organizations in the evening. An art gallery was the first building constructed for Hull-House, making visible to Chicago the immigrants’ need for education and recreation. Hull-House had to relinquish many schemes because of lack of funds. Hull-House’ nonsectarian humanitarianism was often criticized as irreligious in the early days. After five years, Hull-House residents published a book of facts and reflections: Hull-House Maps and Papers.

The problems of poverty brought to the attention of Hull-House often concerned frightened, elderly women with nowhere to go, who resisted being taken to the County Infirmary (also known as the “poorhouse”). Troubled by the women’s distress, Addams invited a half-dozen of them to take a two-week vacation from the Infirmary during the summers by paying a dollar a week for each one to lodge with an old acquaintance and providing two meals a day at Hull-House. The old men in the Infirmary were able to travel each summer on their own, but women could not without outside help. In the early days of Hull-House, there was no Charity Organization Society in Chicago or Visiting Nurse Association. The inadequate charitable efforts were based on the “unfounded optimism that there was no real poverty among us” (121).

The depth of the problem was revealed during the harsh winter after the World’s Fair by the number of unemployed stranded in Chicago. Unable to afford lodgings, the men crowded into city hall and the police stations. Addams recalls Mr. Stead visiting Hull-House that winter when he wrote his indictment of the city, If Christ Came to Chicago. He tried to rally the different moral forces in the city in a meeting, which later developed into the Civic Federation. Hull-House agreed to lodge the homeless women who could go nowhere else, and Addams served on a committee to help with the unemployed: giving the women sewing work and giving the men street sweeping jobs. She was conscious of needing to pay them a fair wage so they would not be worse off when normal occupations resumed.

A Bureau of Organized Charities established itself in the city. Addams tried to adhere to the careful instructions about who qualified for the help of the relief station established at Hull-House. She told a shipping clerk who was out of work that he needed to pursue an employment opportunity on the drainage canal before asking for help. He told her that he had always worked indoors and could not tolerate outdoor work in winter. He tried the canal job and died soon afterwards of pneumonia. From this tragic episode, Addams learned that life cannot be administered by unyielding regulations, and “that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole” (123). Addams also discovered the difference between temporary unemployment problems of workers and the problems of the class that relied entirely on public assistance. The difference between a Settlement House’s relation to its neighbors and a charity organization’s relation to its beneficiaries is that the Settlement House wanted to engage with its neighbors throughout their different stages in life, including their prosperous times.

One function of the Settlement was an information bureau, serving as an interpreter between the various city institutions and the people for whose benefit these institutions were established, as well as protecting people from being taken advantage of in the neighborhood. Hull-House frequently helped get support for deserted women or insurance for widows. When Addams discovered that the children of working mothers often were accidentally injured when locked in or out of their tenement rooms, Hull-House began a day nursery. Eventually, the day care was moved to a building called the Children’s House; later it continued under the United Charities of Chicago, which also taught the immigrant mothers about American life. Addams found that many of these women bore the entire burden of earning for their children as a result of debilitated or absent husbands. The long hours of factory labor to support their children left the mothers unable to nurture them.

Addams briefly touches on the poverty of artists, writers, and visionary inventors who also resided in the neighborhood; many of them were her acquaintances.

Addams recalls Chicago twenty years ago when the Hull-House residents, mostly young people unfamiliar with radicals, had been surprised by the constant sociopolitical discussions. The Haymarket Riot (also known as the Haymarket Affair) had occurred about three years before the establishment of Hull-House, and the city leaders had concluded in the winter of 1889-1890 that the best cure for anarchic acts was open discussion of the grievances of the anti-government groups. Every Sunday evening, great meetings were held in the new Chicago auditorium where residents could express their opinions. Hull-House residents perceived there was an additional need for smaller clubs where men who espoused widely differing economic and social theories could meet and develop tolerance in their discussions. An English laborer organized “The Working People’s Social Science Club” at Hull-House in the spring of 1890. Every Wednesday evening, a speaker presented a subject and then a debate ensued, often between socialists and anarchists. Addams did not see the new “social science” as a true science, but as a term for discussing the problems of an industrial society. Sociology, which was the evolution of these social debates, had not yet been defined as an academic discipline. The University of Chicago, which opened a year before the World’s Fair, was the first university to have a sociology department.

Hull-House developed its early reputation for radicalism due to this Social Science Club. Visitors did not distinguish between the views expressed by the club members in heated discussion and the actual opinions of the Hull-House residents. According to Addams, a Settlement House is a place for passion and enthusiasm in addition to hands-on work for social change. The distrust was somewhat valid, “for too often the reformer is the rebel who defies things as they are, because of the restraints which they impose upon his individual desires rather than because of the general defects of the system” (138). However, Addams remembers even the members who spoke the most passionately and espoused radical views in this early club seemed kindly and safe. Addams staunchly defended free speech, and she announced that she would not be subsidized by wealthy men or bullied by working men to end the social debates. Addams could never accept the Russian-dominated Marxist socialism then prevalent in Chicago that required what she considered an oversimplified interpretation of class conflict.

Hull-House residents discovered that their own efforts to solve neighborhood problems attached them to organizations without radical views, but these public resources would not have existed if the community conscience had not been stimulated by these fervent theorists. Early Settlements were the result of English social reform theories that arrived in America only in the last decade of the 19th century. Although the Hull-House residents were often criticized for the radicalism within the Social Science Club they still believed the discussions should continue “for if the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse” (145). The Hull-House residents, who numbered 25 by the end of the decade, differed greatly in their social beliefs, from a woman who defined all social unrest as anarchy to another who had become a socialist as a student, but their experience living in the industrial neighborhood united them inspired them to lobby for protective legislation. The decade of 1890-1900 in Chicago, with its wide-ranging discussions, was quite different from the city’s attitude 20 years later, when the boom and bust of the 1920s would change people’s attitudes toward social assistance.