Twenty Years at Hull-House - Chapters VII-IX



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CHAPTER VII
SOME EARLY UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE

IF the early American Settlements stood for a more exigent standard in 
philanthropic activities, insisting that each new undertaking should be 
preceded by carefully ascertained facts, then certainly Hull-House held to 
this standard in the opening of our new coffee-house first started as a 
public kitchen. An investigation of the sweatshops had disclosed the fact, 
that sewing women during the busy season paid little attention to the 
feeding of their families, for it was only by working steadily through the 
long day that the scanty pay of five, seven, or nine cents for finishing a 
dozen pairs of trousers could be made into a day's wage; and they bought 
from the nearest grocery the canned goods that could be most quickly 
heated, or gave a few pennies to the children with which they might secure 
a lunch from a neighboring candy shop. 

One of the residents made an investigation, at the instance of the United 
States Department of Agriculture, into the food values of the dietaries of 
the various immigrants, and this was followed by an investigation made by 
another resident, for the United States Department of Labor, into the foods

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of the Italian colony, on the supposition that the constant use of 
imported products bore a distinct relation to the cost of living. I recall 
an Italian who, coming into Hull-House one day as we were sitting at the 
dinner table, expressed great surprise that Americans ate a variety of 
food, because he believed that they partook only of potatoes and beer. A 
little inquiry showed that this conclusion was drawn from the fact that he 
lived next to an Irish saloon and had never seen anything but potatoes 
going in and beer coming out. 

At that time the New England kitchen was comparatively new in Boston, and 
Mrs. Richards, who was largely responsible for its foundation, hoped that 
cheaper cuts of meat and simpler vegetables, if they were subjected to 
slow and thorough processes of cooking, might be made attractive and their 
nutritive value secured for the people who so sadly needed more nutritious 
food. It was felt that this could be best accomplished in public kitchens, 
where the advantage of scientific training and careful supervision could 
be secured. One of the residents went to Boston for a training under Mrs. 
Richards, and when the Hull-House kitchen was fitted under her guidance 
and direction, our hopes ran high for some modification of the food of the 
neighborhood. We did not reckon, however, with the wide diversity in 
nationality and inherited tastes, and while we sold a certain amount of 
the carefully prepared soups and stews in the neigh-

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boring factories­a sale which has steadily increased throughout the 
years­and were also patronized by a few households, perhaps the 
neighborhood estimate was best summed up by the woman who frankly 
confessed, that the food was certainly nutritious, but that she didn't 
like to eat what was nutritious, that she liked to eat "what she'd 
ruther." 

If the dietetics were appreciated but slowly, the social value of the 
coffee-house and the gymnasium, which were in the same building, were 
quickly demonstrated. At that time the saloon halls were the only places 
in the neighborhood where the immigrant could hold his social gatherings, 
and where he could celebrate such innocent and legitimate occasions as 
weddings and christenings. 

These halls were rented very cheaply with the understanding that various 
sums of money should be "passed across the bar," and it was considered a 
mean host or guest who failed to live up to this implied bargain. The 
consequence was that many a reputable party ended with a certain amount of 
disorder, due solely to the fact that the social instinct was traded upon 
and used as a basis for money making by an adroit host. From the beginning 
the young people's clubs had asked for dancing, and nothing was more 
popular than the increased space for parties offered by the gymnasium, 
with the chance to serve refreshments in the room below. We tried 
experiments with

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every known "soft drink," from those extracted from an expensive soda 
water fountain to slender glasses of grape juice, but so far as drinks 
were concerned we never became a rival to the saloon, nor indeed did 
anyone imagine that we were trying to do so. I remember one man who looked 
about the cozy little room and said, "This would be a nice place to sit in 
all day if one could only have beer." But the coffee-house gradually 
performed a mission of its own and became something of a social center to 
the neighborhood as well as a real convenience. Business men from the 
adjacent factories and school teachers from the nearest public schools, 
used it increasingly. The Hull-House students and club members supped 
together in little groups or held their reunions and social banquets, as, 
to a certain extent, did organizations from all parts of the town. The 
experience of the coffee-house taught us not to hold to preconceived ideas 
of what the neighborhood ought to have, but to keep ourselves in readiness 
to modify and adapt our undertakings as we discovered those things which 
the neighborhood was ready to accept. 

Better food was doubtless needed, but more attractive and safer places for 
social gatherings were also needed, and the neighborhood was ready for one 
and not for the other. We had no hint then in Chicago of the small parks 
which were to be established fifteen years later, containing the halls for 
dancing and their own restaurants in

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buildings where the natural desire of the young for gayety and social 
organization, could be safely indulged. Yet even in that early day a 
member of the Hull-House Men's Club who had been appointed superintendent 
of Douglas Park had secured there the first public swimming pool, and his 
fellow club members were proud of the achievement. 

There was in the earliest undertakings at Hull-House a touch of the 
artist's enthusiasm when he translates his inner vision through his chosen 
material into outward form. Keenly conscious of the social confusion all 
about us and the hard economic struggle, we at times believed that the 
very struggle itself might become a source of strength. The devotion of 
the mothers to their children, the dread of the men lest they fail to 
provide for the family dependent upon their daily exertions, at moments 
seemed to us the secret stores of strength from which society is fed, the 
invisible array of passion and feeling which are the surest protectors of 
the world. We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy 
itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its own 
healing, that we might extract from life's very misfortunes a power of 
coöperation which should be effective against them. 

Of course there was always present the harrowing consciousness of the 
difference in economic condition between ourselves and our neighbors. Even

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if we had gone to live in the most wretched tenement, there would have 
always been an essential difference between them and ourselves, for we 
should have had a sense of security in regard to illness and old age and 
the lack of these two securities are the specters which most persistently 
haunt the poor. Could we, in spite of this, make their individual efforts 
more effective through organization and possibly complement them by small 
efforts of our own? 

Some such vague hope was in our minds when we started the Hull-House 
Coöperative Coal Association, which led a vigorous life for three years, 
and developed a large membership under the skillful advice of its one paid 
officer, an English workingman who had had experience in coöperative 
societies at "'ome." Some of the meetings of the association, in which 
people met to consider together their basic dependence upon fire and 
warmth, had a curious challenge of life about them. Because the 
coöperators knew what it meant to bring forth children in the midst of 
privation and to see the tiny creatures struggle for life, their

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recitals cut a cross section, as it were, in that world-old effort­the 
"dying to live" which so inevitably triumphs over poverty and suffering.  
And yet their very familiarity with hardship may have been responsible for 
that sentiment which traditionally ruins business, for a vote of the 
coöperators that the basket buyers be given one basket free out of every 
six, that the presentation of five purchase tickets should entitle the 
holders to a profit in coal instead of stock "because it would be a shame 
to keep them waiting for the dividend," was always pointed to by the 
conservative quarter-of-a-ton buyers as the beginning of the end. At any 
rate, at the close of the third winter, although the Association occupied 
an imposing coal yard on the southeast corner of the Hull-House block and 
its gross receipts were between three and four hundred dollars a day, it 
became evident that the concern could not remain solvent if it continued 
its philanthropic policy, and the experiment was terminated by the 
coöperators taking up their stock in the remaining coal. 

Our next coöperative experiment was much more successful, perhaps because 
it was much more spontaneous.

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At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House during a strike in a 
large shoe factory, the discussions made it clear that the strikers who 
had been most easily frightened, and therefore first to capitulate, were 
naturally those girls who were paying board and were afraid of being put 
out if they fell too far behind. After a recital of a case of peculiar 
hardship one of them exclaimed: "Wouldn't it be fine if we had a boarding 
club of our own, and then we could stand by each other in a time like 
this?" After that events moved quickly. We read aloud together Beatrice 
Potter's little book on "Coöperation," and discussed all the difficulties 
and fascinations of such an undertaking, and on the first of May, 1891, 
two comfortable apartments near Hull-House were rented and furnished. The 
Settlement was responsible for the furniture and paid the first month's 
rent, but beyond that the members managed the club themselves. The 
undertaking "marched," as the French say, from the very first, and always 
on its own feet. Although there were difficulties, none of them proved 
insurmountable, which was a matter for great satisfaction in the face of a 
statement made by the head of the United States Department of Labor, who, 
on a visit to the club when it was but two years old, said that his 
department had investigated many coöperative undertakings, and that none 
founded and managed by women had ever succeeded. At the end of the third 
year the club occupied all

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of the six apartments which the original building contained, and numbered 
fifty members. 

It was in connection with our efforts to secure a building for the Jane 
Club, that we first found ourselves in the dilemma between the needs of 
our neighbors and the kind-hearted response upon which we had already come 
to rely for their relief. The adapted apartments in which the Jane Club 
was housed were inevitably more or less uncomfortable, and we felt that 
the success of the club justified the erection of a building for its sole 
use. 

Up to that time, our history had been as the minor peace of the early 
Church. We had had the most generous interpretation of our efforts. Of 
course, many people were indifferent to the idea of the Settlement; others 
looked on with tolerant and sometimes cynical amusement which we would 
often encounter in a good story related at our expense; but all this was 
remote and unreal to us, and we were sure that if the critics could but 
touch "the life of the people," they would understand. 

The situation changed markedly after the Pullman strike, and our efforts 
to secure factory legislation later brought upon us a certain amount of 
distrust and suspicion; until then we had been considered merely a kindly 
philanthropic undertaking whose new form gave us a certain idealistic 
glamour. But sterner tests were coming, and one of the first was in 
connection with the new building

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for the Jane Club. A trustee of Hull-House came to see us one day with the 
good news that a friend of his was ready to give twenty thousand dollars 
with which to build the desired new clubhouse. When, however, he divulged 
the name of his generous friend, it proved to be that of a man who was 
notorious for underpaying the girls in his establishment and concerning 
whom there were even darker stories. It seemed clearly impossible to erect 
a clubhouse for working girls with such money and we at once said that we 
must decline the offer. The trustee of Hull-House was put in the most 
embarrassing situation; he had, of course, induced the man to give the 
money and had had no thought but that it would be eagerly received; he 
would now be obliged to return with the astonishing, not to say insulting, 
news that the money was considered unfit. 

In the long discussion which followed, it gradually became clear to all of 
us that such a refusal could be valuable only as it might reveal to the 
man himself and to others, public opinion in regard to certain methods of 
money-making, but that from the very nature of the case our refusal of 
this money could not be made public because a representative of Hull-House 
had asked for it. However, the basic fact remained that we could not 
accept the money, and of this the trustee himself was fully convinced. 
This incident occurred during a period of much discussion concerning 
"tainted money"

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and is perhaps typical of the difficulty of dealing with it. It is 
impossible to know how far we may blame the individual for doing that 
which all of his competitors and his associates consider legitimate; at 
the same time, social changes can only be inaugurated by those who feel 
the unrighteousness of contemporary conditions, and the expression of 
their scruples may be the one opportunity for pushing forward moral tests 
into that dubious area wherein wealth is accumulated. 

In the course of time a new clubhouse was built by an old friend of Hull-
House much interested in working girls, and this has been occupied for 
twelve years by the very successful cooperating Jane Club. The incident of 
the early refusal is associated in my mind with a long talk upon the 
subject of questionable money I held with the warden of Toynbee Hall, whom 
I visited at Bristol where he was then canon in the Cathedral. By way of 
illustration he showed me a beautiful little church which had been built 
by the last slave-trading merchant in Bristol, who had been much 
disapproved of by his fellow townsmen and had hoped by this transmutation 
of ill-gotten money into exquisite Gothic architecture to reconcile 
himself both to God and man. His impulse to build may have been born from 
his own scruples or from the quickened consciences of his neighbors who 
saw that the world-old iniquity of enslaving men must at length come to an 
end. The Abolitionists may have regarded this beautiful building

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as the fruit of a contrite heart, or they may have scorned it as an 
attempt to magnify the goodness of a slave trader and thus perplex the 
doubting citizens of Bristol in regard to the entire moral issue. 

Canon Barnett did not pronounce judgment on the Bristol merchant. He was, 
however, quite clear upon the point that a higher moral standard for 
industrial life must be embodied in legislation as rapidly as possible, 
that it may bear equally upon all, and that an individual endeavoring to 
secure this legislation must forbear harsh judgment. This was doubtless a 
sound position, but during all the period of hot discussion concerning 
tainted money I never felt clear enough on the general principle involved, 
to accept the many invitations to write and speak upon the subject, 
although I received much instruction in the many letters of disapproval 
sent to me by radicals of various schools because I was a member of the 
university extension staff of the then new University of Chicago, the 
righteousness of whose foundation they challenged. 

A little incident of this time illustrated to me the confusion in the 
minds of a least many older men between religious teaching and advancing 
morality. One morning I received a letter from the head of a Settlement in 
New York expressing his perplexity over the fact that his board of 
trustees had asked money from a man notorious for his unscrupulous 
business methods. My corre-

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spondent had placed his resignation in the hands of his board, that they 
might accept it at any time when they felt his utterances on the subject 
of tainted money were offensive, for he wished to be free to openly 
discuss a subject of such grave moral import. The very morning when my 
mind was full of the questions raised by this letter, I received a call 
from the daughter of the same business man whom my friend considered so 
unscrupulous. She was passing through Chicago and came to ask me to give 
her some arguments which she might later use with her father to confute 
the charge that Settlements were irreligious. She said, "You see, he has 
been asked to give money to our Settlement and would like to do it, if his 
conscience was only clear; he disapproves of Settlements because they give 
no religious instruction; he has always been a very devout man." 

I remember later discussing the incident with Washington Gladden who was 
able to parallel it from his own experience. Now that this discussion upon 
tainted money has subsided, it is easy to view it with a certain 
detachment impossible at the moment, and it is even difficult to 
understand why the feeling should have been so intense, although it 
doubtless registered genuine moral concern. 

There was room for discouragement in the many unsuccessful experiments in 
coöperation which were carried on in Chicago during the early nineties; a 
carpenter shop on Van Buren Street near

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Halsted, a labor exchange started by the unemployed, not so paradoxical an 
arrangement as it seems, and a very ambitious plan for a country colony 
which was finally carried out at Ruskin, Tennessee. In spite of failures, 
coöperative schemes went on, some of the same men appearing in one after 
another with irrepressible optimism. I remember during a coöperative 
congress, which met at Hull-House in the World's Fair summer that Mr. 
Henry D. Lloyd, who collected records of coöperative experiments with the 
enthusiasm with which other men collect coins or pictures, put before the 
congress some of the remarkable successes in Ireland and North England, 
which he later embodied in his book on "Copartnership." One of the old-
time coöperators denounced the modern method as "too much like cut-throat 
business" and declared himself in favor of "principles which may have 
failed over and over again, but are nevertheless as sound as the law of 
gravitation." Mr. Lloyd and I agreed that the fiery old man presented as 
fine a spectacle of devotion to a lost cause as either of us had ever 
seen, although we both possessed memories well stored with such romantic 
attachments. 

And yet this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition 
and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all 
over the face of the earth. Five years later in the same Hull-House hall 
in which the coöperative congress was held, an Italian senator told a large

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audience of his fellow countrymen of the successful system of coöperative 
banks in north Italy and of their coöperative methods of selling produce 
to the value of millions of francs annually; still later Sir Horace 
Plunkett related the remarkable successes in coöperation in Ireland. 

I have seldom been more infected by enthusiasm than I once was in Dulwich 
at a meeting of English coöperators where I was fairly overwhelmed by the 
fervor underlying the businesslike proceedings of the congress, and 
certainly when I served as a juror in the Paris Exposition of 1900, 
nothing in the entire display in the department of Social Economy was so 
imposing as the building housing the exhibit, which had been erected by 
coöperative trades-unions without the assistance of a single contractor. 

And so one's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized 
ideal of better human relations. At least traces of successful coöperation 
are found even in individualistic America. I recall my enthusiasm on the 
day when I set forth to lecture at New Harmony, Indiana, for I had early 
been thrilled by the tale of Robert Owen, as every young person must be 
who is interested in social reform; I was delighted to find so much of his 
spirit still clinging to the little town which had long ago held one of 
his ardent experiments, although the poor old coöperators, who for many 
years claimed friendship at Hull-House because they heard that we "had 
once tried a coöperative

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coal association," might well have convinced me of the persistency of the 
coöperative ideal. 

Many experiences in those early years, although vivid, seemed to contain 
no illumination; nevertheless they doubtless permanently affected our 
judgments concerning what is called crime and vice. I recall a series of 
striking episodes on the day when I took the wife and child, as well as 
the old godfather, of an Italian convict to visit him in the State 
Penitentiary. When we approached the prison, the sight of its heavy stone 
walls and armed sentries threw the godfather into a paroxysm of rage; he 
cast his hat upon the ground and stamped upon it, tore his hair, and 
loudly fulminated in weird Italian oaths, until one of the guards, seeing 
his strange actions, came to inquire if "the gentleman was having a fit." 
When we finally saw the convict, his wife, to my extreme distress, talked 
of nothing but his striped clothing, until the poor man wept with chagrin. 
Upon our return journey to Chicago, the little son aged eight presented me 
with two oranges, so affectionately and gayly that I was filled with 
reflections upon the advantage of each generation making a fresh start, 
when the train boy, finding the stolen fruit in my lap, violently 
threatened to arrest the child. But stranger than any episode was the fact 
itself that neither the convict, his wife, nor his godfather for a moment 
considered him a criminal. He had merely gotten excited over cards and had 
stabbed his adversary

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with a knife. "Why should a man who took his luck badly be kept forever 
from the sun?" was their reiterated inquiry. 

I recall our perplexity over the first girls who had "gone astray"­the 
poor, little, forlorn objects, fifteen and sixteen years old, with their 
moral natures apparently untouched and unawakened; one of them whom the 
police had found in a professional house and asked us to shelter for a few 
days until she could be used as a witness, was clutching a battered doll 
which she had kept with her during her six months of an "evil life." Two 
of these prematurely aged children came to us one day directly from the 
maternity ward of the Cook County hospital, each with a baby in her arms, 
asking for protection, because they did not want to go home for fear of 
"being licked." For them were no jewels nor idle living such as the 
storybooks portrayed. The first of the older women whom I knew came to 
Hull-House to ask that her young sister, who was about to arrive from 
Germany, might live near us; she wished to find her respectable work and 
wanted her to have the "decent pleasures" that Hull-House afforded. After 
the arrangement had been completed and I had in a measure recovered from 
my astonishment at the businesslike way in which she spoke of her own 
life, I ventured to ask her history. In a very few words she told me that 
she had come from Germany as a music teacher to an American family.

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At the end of two years, in order to avoid a scandal involving the head of 
the house, she had come to Chicago where her child was born, but when the 
remittances ceased after its death, finding herself without home and 
resources, she had gradually become involved in her present mode of life. 
By dint of utilizing her family solicitude, we finally induced her to move 
into decent lodgings before her sister arrived, and for a difficult year 
she supported herself by her exquisite embroidery. At the end of that 
time, she gave up the struggle, the more easily as her young sister, well 
established in the dressmaking department of a large shop, had begun to 
suspect her past life. 

But discouraging as these and other similar efforts often were, 
nevertheless the difficulties were infinitely less in those days when we 
dealt with "fallen girls" than in the years following when the "white 
slave traffic" became gradually established and when agonized parents, as 
well as the victims themselves, were totally unable to account for the 
situation. In the light of recent disclosures, it seems as if we were 
unaccountably dull not to have seen what was happening, especially to the 
Jewish girls among whom "the home trade of the white slave traffic" was 
first carried on and who were thus made to break through countless 
generations of chastity. We early encountered the difficulties of that old 
problem of restoring the woman, or even the child, into the society she 
has once outraged.

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I well remember our perplexity when we attempted to help two girls 
straight from a Virginia tobacco factory, who had been decoyed into a 
disreputable house when innocently seeking a lodging on the late evening 
of their arrival. Although they had been rescued promptly, the stigma 
remained, and we found it impossible to permit them to join any of the 
social clubs connected with Hull-House, not so much because there was 
danger of contamination, as because the parents of the club members would 
have resented their presence most hotly. One of our trustees succeeded in 
persuading a repentant girl, fourteen years old, whom we tried to give a 
fresh start in another part of the city, to attend a Sunday School class 
of a large Chicago church. The trustee hoped that the contact with nice 
girls, as well as the moral training, would help the poor child on her 
hard road. But unfortunately tales of her shortcomings reached the 
superintendent who felt obliged, in order to protect the other girls, to 
forbid her the school. She came back to tell us about it, defiant as well 
as discouraged, and had it not been for the experience with our own clubs, 
we could easily have joined her indignation over a church which "acted as 
if its Sunday School was a show window for candy kids." 

In spite of poignant experiences or, perhaps, because of them, the memory 
of the first years at Hull-House is more or less blurred with fatigue, for 
we could of course become accustomed only gradually to

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the unending activity and to the confusion of a house constantly filling 
and refilling with groups of people. The little children who came to the 
kindergarten in the morning were followed by the afternoon clubs of older 
children, and those in turn made way for the educational and social 
organizations of adults, occupying every room in the house every evening. 
All one's habits of living had to be readjusted, and any student's 
tendency to sit with a book by the fire was of necessity definitely 
abandoned. 

To thus renounce "the luxury of personal preference" was, however, a mere 
trifle compared to our perplexity over the problems of an industrial 
neighborhood situated in an unorganized city. Life pressed hard in many 
directions and yet it has always seemed to me rather interesting that when 
we were so distressed over its stern aspects and so impressed with the 
lack of municipal regulations, the first building erected for Hull-House 
should have been designed for an art gallery, for although it contained a 
reading-room on the first floor and a studio above, the largest space on 
the second floor was carefully designed and lighted for art exhibits, 
which had to do only with the cultivation of that which appealed to the 
powers of enjoyment as over against a wage-earning capacity. It was also 
significant that a Chicago business man, fond of pictures himself, 
responded to this first appeal of the new and certainly puzzling 
undertaking called a Settlement.

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The situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that at the time the 
building was erected in 1891, our free lease of the land upon which Hull-
House stood expired in 1895. The donor of the building, however, overcame 
the difficulty by simply calling his gift a donation of a thousand dollars 
a year. This restriction of course necessitated the simplest sort of a 
structure, although I remember on the exciting day when the new building 
was promised to us, that I looked up my European notebook which contained 
the record of my experience in Ulm, hoping that I might find a description 
of what I then thought "a Cathedral of Humanity" ought to be. The 
description was "low and widespreading as to include all men in fellowship 
and mutual responsibility even as the older pinnacles and spires indicated 
communion with God." The description did not prove of value as an 
architectural motive I am afraid, although the architects, who have 
remained our friends through all the years, performed marvels with a 
combination of complicated demands and little money. At the moment when I 
read this

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girlish outbreak it gave me much comfort, for in those days in addition to 
our other perplexities Hull-House was often called irreligious. 

These first buildings were very precious to us and it afforded us the 
greatest pride and pleasure as one building after another was added to the 
Hull-House group. They clothed in brick and mortar and made visible to the 
world that which we were trying to do; they stated to Chicago that 
education and recreation ought to be extended to the immigrants. The boys 
came in great numbers to our provisional gymnasium fitted up in a former 
saloon, and it seemed to us quite as natural that a Chicago man, fond of 
athletics, should erect a building for them, as that the boys should 
clamor for more room. 

I do not wish to give a false impression, for we were often bitterly 
pressed for money and worried by the prospect of unpaid bills, and we gave 
up one golden scheme after another because we could not afford it; we 
cooked the meals and kept the books and washed the windows without a 
thought of hardship if we thereby saved money for the consummation of some 
ardently desired undertaking. 

But in spite of our financial stringency, I always believed that money 
would be given when we had once clearly reduced the Settlement idea to the 
actual deed. This chapter, therefore, would be incomplete if it did not 
record a certain theory of nonresistance or rather universal good will 
which I

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had worked out in connection with the Settlement idea and which was later 
so often and so rudely disturbed. At that time I had come to believe that 
if the activities of Hull-House were ever misunderstood, it would be 
either because there was not time to fully explain or because our motives 
had become mixed, for I was convinced that disinterested action was like 
truth or beauty in its lucidity and power of appeal. 

But more gratifying than any understanding or response from without could 
possibly be, was the consciousness that a growing group of residents was 
gathering at Hull-House, held together in that soundest of all social 
bonds, the companionship of mutual interests. These residents came 
primarily because they were genuinely interested in the social situation 
and believed that the Settlement was valuable as a method of approach to 
it. A house in which the men residents lived was opened across the street, 
and at the end of the first five years the Hull-House residential force 
numbered fifteen, a majority of whom still remain identified with the 
Settlement. 

Even in those early years we caught glimpses of the fact that certain 
social sentiments, which are "the difficult and cumulating product of 
human growth" and which like all higher aims live only by communion and 
fellowship, are cultivated most easily in the fostering soil of a 
community life. 

Occasionally I obscurely felt as if a demand were

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being made upon us for a ritual which should express and carry forward the 
hope of the social movement. I was constantly bewildered by the number of 
requests I received to officiate at funeral services and by the curious 
confessions made to me by total strangers. For a time I accepted the 
former and on one awful occasion furnished "the poetic part" of a wedding 
ceremony really performed by a justice of the peace, but I soon learned to 
steadfastly refuse such offices, although I saw that for many people 
without church affiliations the vague humanitarianism the Settlement 
represented was the nearest approach they could find to an expression of 
their religious sentiments. 

These hints of what the Settlement might mean to at least a few spirits 
among its contemporaries became clear to me for the first time one 
summer's day in rural England, when I discussed with John Trevor his 
attempts to found a labor church and his desire to turn the toil and 
danger attached to the life of the workingman into the means of a 
universal fellowship. That very year a papyrus leaf brought to the British 
Museum from Egypt, containing among other sayings of Jesus, "Raise the 
stone, and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and I am there," was 
a powerful reminder to all England of the basic relations between daily 
labor and Christian teaching. 

In those early years at Hull-House we were, however, in no danger of 
losing ourselves in mazes

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of speculation or mysticism, and there was shrewd penetration in a 
compliment I received from one of our Scotch neighbors. He came down Polk 
Street as I was standing near the foundations of our new gymnasium, and in 
response to his friendly remark that "Hull-House was spreading out," I 
replied that "Perhaps we were spreading out too fast." "Oh, no," he 
rejoined, "you can afford to spread out wide, you are so well planted in 
the mud," giving the compliment, however, a practical turn, as he glanced 
at the deep mire on the then unpaved street. It was this same condition of 
Polk Street which had caused the crown prince of Belgium when he was 
brought upon a visit to Hull-House to shake his head and meditatively 
remark, "There is not such a street­no, not one­in all the territory of 
Belgium." 

At the end of five years the residents of Hull-House published some first 
found facts and our reflections thereon in a book called "Hull-House Maps 
and Papers." The maps were taken from information collected by one of the 
residents for the United States Bureau of Labor in the investigation into 
"the slums of great cities" and the papers treated of various neighborhood 
matters with candor and genuine concern if not with skill. The first 
edition became exhausted in two years, and apparently the Boston publisher 
did not consider the book worthy of a second. 



Page 154

CHAPTER VIII
PROBLEMS OF POVERTY

THAT neglected and forlorn old age is daily brought to the attention of a 
Settlement which undertakes to bear its share of the neighborhood burden 
imposed by poverty, was pathetically clear to us during our first months 
of residence at Hull-House. One day a boy of ten led a tottering old lady 
into the House, saying that she had slept for six weeks in their kitchen 
on a bed made up next to the stove; that she had come when her son died, 
although none of them had ever seen her before; but because her son had 
"once worked in the same shop with Pa she thought of him when she had 
nowhere to go." The little fellow concluded by saying that our house was 
so much bigger than theirs that he thought we would have more room 

[image caption: A SPENT OLD MAN.]

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for beds. The old woman herself said absolutely nothing, but looking on 
with that gripping fear of the poorhouse in her eyes, she was a living 
embodiment of that dread which is so heartbreaking that the occupants of 
the County Infirmary themselves seem scarcely less wretched than those who 
are making their last stand against it. 

This look was almost more than I could bear for only a few days before 
some frightened women had bidden me come quickly to the house of an old 
German woman, whom two men from the country agent's office were attempting 
to remove to the County Infirmary. The poor old creature had thrown 
herself bodily upon a small and battered chest of drawers and clung there, 
clutching it so firmly that it would have been impossible to remove her 
without also taking the piece of furniture . She did not weep nor moan nor 
indeed make any human sound, but between her broken gasps for breath she 
squealed shrilly like a frightened animal caught in a trap. The little 
group of women and children gathered at her door stood aghast at this 
realization of the black dread which always clouds the lives of the very 
poor when work is slack, but which constantly grows more imminent and 
threatening as old age approaches. The neighborhood women and I hastened 
to make all sorts of promises as to the support of the old woman and the 
country officials, only too glad to be rid of their unhappy duty, left her 
to our ministrations. This dread of

Page 156

the poorhouse, the result of centuries of deterrent Poor Law 
administration, seemed to me not without some justification one summer 
when I found myself perpetually distressed by the unnecessary idleness and 
forlornness of the old women in the Cook County Infirmary, many of whom I 
had known in the years when activity was still a necessity, and when they 
yet felt bustlingly important. To take away from an old woman whose life 
has been spent in household cares all the foolish little belongings to 
which her affections cling and to which her very fingers have become 
accustomed, is to take away her last incentive to activity, almost to life 
itself. To give an old woman only a chair and a bed, to leave her no 
cupboard in which her treasures may be stowed, not only that she may take 
them out when she desires occupation, but that their mind may dwell upon 
them in moments of revery, is to reduce living almost beyond the limit of 
human endurance. 

The poor creature who clung so desperately to her chest of drawers was 
really clinging to the last remnant of normal living­a symbol of all she 
was asked to renounce. For several years after this summer I invited five 
or six old women to take a two weeks' vacation from the poorhouse which 
was eagerly and even gayly accepted. Almost all the old men in the County 
Infirmary wander away each summer taking their chances for finding food or 
shelter and return much refreshed by the little "tramp," but the old women 
cannot do this unless

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they have some help from the outside, and yet the expenditure of a very 
little money secures for them the coveted vacation. I found that a few 
pennies paid their car fare into town, a dollar a week procured lodging 
with an old acquaintance; assured of two good meals a day in the Hull-
House coffee-house they could count upon numerous cups of tea among old 
friends to whom they would airily state that they had "come out for a 
little change" and hadn't yet made up their minds about "going in again 
for the winter." They thus enjoyed a two weeks' vacation to the top of 
their bent and returned with wondrous tales of their adventures, with 
which they regaled the other paupers during the long winter. 

The reminiscences of these old women, their shrewd comments upon life, 
their sense of having reached a point where they may at last speak freely 
with nothing to lose because of their frankness, makes them often the most 
delightful of companions. I recall one of my guests, the mother of many 
scattered children, whose one bright spot through all the dreary years had 
been the wedding feast of her son Mike,­a feast which had become 
transformed through long meditation into the nectar and ambrosia of the 
very gods. As a farewell fling before she went "in" again, we dined 
together upon chicken pie, but it did not taste like the "the chicken pie 
at Mike's wedding" and she was disappointed after all.

Page 158

Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which 
one would fain associate with old age. I recall the dying hour of one old 
Scotchwoman whose long struggle to "keep respectable" had so embittered 
her that her last words were gibes and taunts for those who were trying to 
minister to her. "So you came in yourself this morning, did you? You only 
sent things yesterday. I guess you knew when the doctor was coming. Don't 
try to warm my feet with anything but that old jacket that I've got there; 
it belonged to my boy who was drowned at sea nigh thirty years ago, but 
it's warmer yet with human feelings than any of your damned charity hot-
water bottles." Suddenly the harsh gasping voice was stilled in death and 
I awaited the doctor's coming shaken and horrified. 

The lack of municipal regulation already referred to was, in the early 
days of Hull-House, parallelled by the inadequacy of the charitable 
efforts of the city and an unfounded optimism that there was no real 
poverty among us. Twenty years ago there was no Charity Organization 
Society in Chicago and the Visiting Nurse Association had not yet begun 
its beneficial work, while the relief societies, although conscientiously 
administered, were inadequate in extent and antiquated in method. 

As social reformers gave themselves over to discussion of general 
principles, so the poor invariably accused poverty itself of their 
destruction. I re-

Page 159

call a certain Mrs. Moran, who was returning one rainy day from the office 
of the county agent with her arms full of paper bags containing beans and 
flour which alone lay between her children and starvation. Although she 
had no money she boarded a street car in order to save her booty from 
complete destruction by the rain, and as the burst bags dropped "flour on 
the ladies' dresses" and ""beans all over the place," she was sharply 
reprimanded by the conductor, who was the further exasperated when he 
discovered she had no fare. He put her off, as she had hoped he would, 
almost in front of Hull-House. She related to us her state of mind as she 
stepped off the car and saw the last of her wares disappearing; she 
admitted she forgot the proprieties and "cursed a little," but, curiously 
enough, she pronounced her malediction, not against the rain nor the 
conductor, nor yet against the worthless husband who had been set up to 
the city prison, but, true to the Chicago spirit of the moment, went to 
the root of the matter and roundly "cursed poverty." 

This spirit of generalization and lack of organization among the 
charitable forces of the city was painfully revealed in that terrible 
winter after the World's Fair, when the general financial depression 
throughout the country was much intensified in Chicago by the numbers of 
unemployed stranded at the close of the exposition. When the first cold 
weather came the police stations and the very

Page 160

corridors of the city hall were crowded by men who could afford no other 
lodging. They made huge demonstrations on the lake front, reminding one of 
the London gatherings in Trafalgar Square. 

It was the winter in which Mr. Stead wrote his indictment of Chicago. I 
can vividly recall his visits to Hull-House, some of them between eleven 
and twelve o'clock at night, when he would come in wet and hungry from an 
investigation of the levee district, and while he was drinking hot 
chocolate before an open fire, would relate in one of his curious 
monologues, his experience as an out-of-door laborer standing in line 
without an overcoat for two hours in the sleet, that he might have a 
chance to sweep the streets; or his adventures with a crook, who mistook 
him for one of this own kind and offered him a place as an agent for a 
gambling house, which he promptly accepted. Mr. Stead was much impressed 
with the mixed goodness in Chicago, the lack of rectitude in many high 
places, the simple kindness of the most wretched to each other. Before he 
published "If Christ Came to Chicago" he made his attempt to rally the 
diverse moral forces of the city in a huge mass meeting, which resulted in 
a temporary organization, later developing into the Civic Federation. I 
was a member of the committee of five appointed to carry out the 
suggestions made in this remarkable meeting, and or first concern was to 
appoint a committee to deal with the unemployed. But

Page 161

when has a committee ever dealt satisfactorily with the unemployed? Relief 
stations were opened in various part of the city, temporary lodging houses 
were established, Hull-House undertaking to lodge the homeless women who 
could be received nowhere else; employment stations were opened giving 
sewing to the women, and street sweeping for the men was organized. It was 
in connection with the latter that the perplexing question of the danger 
of permanently lowering wages at such a crisis, in the praiseworthy effort 
to bring speedy relief, was brought home to me. I insisted that it was 
better to have the men work half a day for seventy-five cents than a whole 
day for a dollar, better that they should earn three dollars in two days 
than in three days. I resigned from the street-cleaning committee in 
despair of making the rest of the committee understand that, as our real 
object was not street cleaning but the help of the unemployed, we must 
treat the situation in such wise that the men would not be worse off when 
they returned to their normal occupations. The discussion opened up 
situations new to me and carried me far afield in perhaps the most serious 
economic reading I have ever done. 

A beginning also was then made toward a Bureau of Organized Charities, the 
main office being put in charge of a young man recently come from Boston, 
who lived at Hull-House. But to employ scientific methods for the first 
time at such a moment in-

Page 162

volved difficulties, and the most painful episode of the winter came for 
me from an attempt on my part to conform to carefully received 
instructions. A shipping clerk whom I had known for a long time had lost 
his place, as so many people had that year, and came to the relief station 
established at Hull-House four or five times to secure help for his 
family. I told him one day of the opportunity for work on the drainage 
canal and intimated that if any employment were obtainable, he ought to 
exhaust that possibility before asking for help. The man replied that he 
had always worked indoors and that he could not endure outside work in 
winter. I am grateful to remember that I was too uncertain to be severe, 
although I held to my instructions. He did not come again for relief, but 
worked for two days digging on the canal, where he contracted pneumonia 
and died a week later. I have never lost trace of the two little children 
he left behind him, although I cannot see them without a bitter 
consciousness that it was at their expense I learned that life cannot be 
administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a 
man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and 
habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is almost sure to 
invite blundering. 

It was also during this winter that I became permanently impressed with 
the kindness of the poor to each other; the woman who lives upstairs will 
willingly share her breakfast with the family below

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because she knows they "are hard up"; the man who boarded with them last 
winter will give a month's rent because he knows the father of the family 
is out of work; the baker across the street who is fast being pushed to 
the wall by his downtown competitors, will send across three loaves of 
stale bread because he has seen the children looking longingly into his 
window and suspects they are hungry. There are also the families who, 
during times of business depression, are obliged to seek help from the 
county or some benevolent society, but who are themselves most anxious not 
to be confounded with the pauper class, with whom indeed they do not in 
the least belong. Charles Booth, in his brilliant chapter on the 
unemployed, expresses regret that the problems of the working class are so 
often confounded with the problems of the inefficient and the idle, that 
although working people live in the same street with those in need of 
charity, to thus confound two problems is to render the solution of both 
impossible. 

I remember one family in which the father had been out of work for this 
same winter, most of the furniture had been pawned, and as the worn-out 
shoes could not be replaced the children could not go to school. The 
mother was ill and barely able to come for the supplies and medicines. Two 
years later she invited me to supper one Sunday evening in the little home 
which had been completely restored, and she gave as a reason for the 
invitation

Page 164

that she couldn't bear to have me remember them as they had been during 
that one winter, which she insisted had been unique in her twelve years of 
married life. She said that it was as if she had met me, not as I am 
ordinarily, but as I should appear misshapen with rheumatism or with a 
face distorted by neuralgic pain; that it was not fair to judge poor 
people that way. She perhaps unconsciously illustrated the difference 
between the relief-station relation to the poor and the Settlement 
relation to its neighbors, the latter wishing

Page 165

to know them through all the varying conditions of life, to stand by when 
they are in distress, but by no means to drop intercourse with them when 
normal prosperity has returned, enabling the relation to become more 
social and free from economic disturbance. 

Possibly something of the same effort has to be made within the Settlement 
itself to keep its own sense of proportion in regard to the relation of 
the crowded city quarter to the rest of the country. It was in the spring 
following this terrible winter, during a journey to meet lecture 
engagements in California, that I found myself amazed at the large 
stretches of open country and prosperous towns through which we passed day 
by day, whose existence I had quite forgotten. 

In the latter part of the summer of 1895, I served as a member on a 
commission appointed by the mayor of Chicago, to investigate conditions in 
the county poorhouse, public attention having become centered on it 
through one of those distressing stories, which exaggerates the wrong in a 
public institution while at the same time it reveals conditions which need 
to be rectified. However necessary publicity is for securing reformed 
administration, however useful such exposures may be for political 
purposes, the whole is attended by such a waste of the most precious human 
emotions, by such a tearing of living tissue, that it can scarcely be 
endured. Every time I entered Hull-House dur-

Page 166

ing the days of the investigation, I would find waiting for me from twenty 
to thirty people whose friends and relatives were in the suspected 
institution, all in such acute distress of mind that to see them was to 
look upon the victims of deliberate torture. In most cases my visitor 
would state that it seemed impossible to put their invalids in any other 
place, but if these stories were true, something must be done. Many of the 
patients were taken out only to be returned after a few days or weeks to 
meet the sullen hostility of their attendants and with their own attitude 
changed from confidence to timidity and alarm. 

This piteous dependence of the poor upon the good will of public officials 
was made clear to us in an early experience with a peasant woman straight 
from the fields of Germany, whom we met during our first six months at 
Hull-House. Her four years in America had been spent in patiently carrying 
water up and down two flights of stairs, and in washing the heavy flannel 
suits of iron foundry workers. For this her pay had averaged thirty-five 
cents a day. Three of her daughters had fallen victims to the vice of the 
city. The mother was bewildered and distressed, but understood nothing. We 
were able to induce the betrayer of one daughter to marry her; the second, 
after a tedious lawsuit, supported his child; with the third we were able 
to do nothing. This woman is now living with her family in a little house 
seven-

Page 167

teen miles from the city. She has made two payments on her land and is a 
lesson to all beholders as she pastures her cow up and down the railroad 
tracks and makes money from her ten acres. She did not need charity for 
she had an immense capacity for hard work, but she sadly needed the 
service of the State's attorney office, enforcing the laws designed for 
the protection of such girls as her daughters. 

We early found ourselves spending many hours in efforts to secure support 
for deserted women, insurance for bewildered widows, damages for injured 
operators, furniture from the clutches of the installment store. The 
Settlement is valuable as an information and interpretation bureau. It 
constantly acts between the various institutions of the city and the 
people for whose benefit these institutions were erected. The hospitals, 
the county agencies, and State asylums are often but vague rumors to the 
people who need them most. Another function of the Settlement to its 
neighborhood resembles that of the big brother whose mere presence on the 
playground protects the little one from bullies. 

We early learned to know the children of hard-driven mothers who went out 
to work all day, sometimes leaving the little things in the casual care of 
a neighbor, but often locking them into their tenement rooms. The first 
three crippled children we encountered in the neighborhood had all been

Page 168

injured while their mothers were at work: one had fallen out of a third-
story window, another had been burned, and the third had a curved spine 
due to the fact that for three years he had been tied all day long to the 
leg of the kitchen table, only released at noon by his older brother who 
hastily ran in from a neighboring factory to share his lunch with him.  
When the hot weather came the restless children could not brook the 
confinement of the stuffy rooms, and, as it was not considered safe to 
leave the doors open because of sneak thieves, many of the children were 
locked out. During our first summer an increasing number of these poor 
little mites would wander into the cool hallway of Hull-House. We kept 
them there and fed them at noon, in return for which we were sometimes 
offered a hot penny which had been held in a tight little fist "ever since 
mother left this morning, to buy something to eat with." Out of 
kindergarten hours our little guests noisily enjoyed the hospitality of 
our bedrooms under the so-called care of any resident who volunteered to 
keep an eye on them, but later they were moved into a

Page 169

neighboring apartment under more systematic supervision. 

Hull-House was thus committed to a day nursery which we sustained for 
sixteen years first in a little cottage on a side street and then in a 
building designed for its use called the Children's House. It is now 
carried on by the United Charities of Chicago in a finely equipped 
building on our block, where the immigrant mothers are cared for as well 
as the children, and where they are taught the things which will make life 
in America more possible. Our early day nursery brought us into natural 
relations with the poorest women of the neighborhood, many of whom were 
bearing the burden of dissolute and incompetent husbands in addition to 
the support of their children. Some of them presented an impressive 
manifestation of that miracle of affection which outlives abuse, neglect, 
and crime,­the affection which cannot be plucked from the heart where it 
has lived, although it may serve only to torture and torment. "Has your 
husband come back?" you inquire of Mrs. S., whom you have known for eight 
years as an overworked woman bringing her three delicate children every 
morning to the nursery; she is bent under the double burden of earning the 
money which supports them and giving them the tender care which alone 
keeps them alive. The oldest two children have at last gone to work, and 
Mrs. S. has allowed herself the luxury of staying at home two days a week.

Page 170

And now the worthless husband is back again­the "gentlemanly gambler" type 
who, through all vicissitudes, manages to present a white shirtfront and a 
gold watch to the world, but who is dissolute, idle and extravagant. You 
dread to think how much his presence will increase the drain upon the 
family exchequer, and you know that he stayed away until he was certain 
that the children were old enough to earn money for his luxuries. Mrs. S. 
does not pretend to take his return lightly, but she replies in all 
seriousness and simplicity, "You know my feeling for him has never 
changed. You may think me foolish, but I was always proud of his good 
looks and educated appearance. I was lonely and homesick during those 
eight years when the children were little and needed so much doctoring, 
but I could never bring myself to feel hard toward him, and I used to pray 
the good Lord to keep him from harm and bring him back to us; so, of 
course, I'm thankful now." She passes on with a dignity which gives one a 
new sense of the security of affection. 

I recall a similar case of a woman who had supported her three children 
for five years, during which time her dissolute husband constantly 
demanded money for drink and kept her perpetually worried and intimidated. 
One Saturday, before the "blessed Easter," he came back from a long 
debauch, ragged and filthy, but in a state of lachrymose repentance. The 
poor wife received him as

Page 171

a returned prodigal, believed that his remorse would prove lasting, and 
felt sure that if she and the children went to church with him on Easter 
Sunday and he could be induced to take the pledge before the priest, all 
their troubles would be ended. After hours of vigorous effort and the 
expenditure of all her savings, he finally sat on the front doorstep the 
morning of Easter Sunday, bathed, shaved and arrayed in a fine new suit of 
clothes. She left him sitting there in the reluctant spring sunshine while 
she finished washing and dressing the children. When she finally opened 
the front door with the three shining children that they might all set 
forth together, the returned prodigal had disappeared, and was not seen 
again until midnight, when he came back in a glorious state of 
intoxication from the proceeds of his pawned clothes and clad once more in 
the dingiest attire. She took him in without comment, only to begin again 
the wretched cycle. There were of course instances of the criminal husband 
as well as of the merely vicious. I recall one woman who, during seven 
years, never missed a visiting day at the penitentiary when she might see 
her husband, and whose little children in the nursery proudly reported the 
messages from father with no notion that he was in disgrace, so absolutely 
did they reflect the gallant spirit of their mother. 

While one was filled with admiration for these heroic women, something was 
also to be said for

Page 172

some of the husbands, for the sorry men who, for one reason or another, 
had failed in the struggle of life. Sometimes this failure was purely 
economic and the men were competent to give the children, whom they were 
not able to support, the care and guidance and even education which were 
of the highest value. Only a few months ago I met upon the street one of 
the early nursery mothers who for five years had been living in another 
part of the city, and in response to my query as to the welfare of her 
five children, she bitterly replied, "All of them except Mary have been 
arrested at one time or another, thank you." In reply to my remark that I 
thought her husband had always had such admirable control over them, she 
burst out, "That has been the whole trouble. I got tired taking care of 
him and didn't believe that his laziness was all due to his health, as he 
said, so I left him and said that I would support the children, but not 
him. From that minute the trouble with the four boys began. I never knew 
what they were doing, and after every sort of a scrape I finally put Jack 
and the twins into institutions where I pay for them. Joe has gone to work 
at last, but with a disgraceful record behind him. I tell you I ain't so 
sure that because a woman can make big money that she can be both father 
and mother to her children." 

As I walked on, I could but wonder in which particular we are most 
stupid­to judge a man's worth so solely by his wage-earning capacity that 
a good

Page 173

wife feels justified in leaving him, or in holding fast to that wretched 
delusion that a woman can both support and nurture her children. 

One of the most piteous revelations of the futility of the latter attempt 
came to me through the mother of "Goosie," as the children for years 
called a little boy who, because he was brought to the nursery wrapped up 
in his mother's shawl, always had his hair filled with the down and small 
feathers from the feather brush factory where she worked. One March 
morning, Goosie's mother was hanging out the washing on a shed roof before 
she left for the factory. Five-year-old Goosie was trotting at her heels 
handing her clothes pins, when he was suddenly blown off the roof by the 
high wind into the alley below. His neck was broken by the fall, and as he 
lay piteous and limp on a pile of frozen refuse, his mother cheerily 
called him to "climb up again," so confident do overworked mothers become 
that their children cannot get hurt. After the funeral, as the poor mother 
sat in the nursery postponing the moment when she must go back to her 
empty rooms, I asked her, in a futile effort to be of comfort, if there 
was anything more we could do for her. The overworked, sorrow-stricken 
woman looked up and replied, "If you could give me my wages for to-morrow, 
I would not go to work in the factory at all. I would like to stay at home 
all day and hold the baby. Goosie was always asking me to

Page 174

take him and I never had any time." This statement revealed the condition 
of many nursery mothers who are obliged to forego the joys and solaces 
which belong to even the most poverty-stricken. The long hours of factory 
labor necessary for earning the support of a child leave no time for the 
tender care and caressing which may enrich the life of the most piteous 
baby. 

With all of the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the 
young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend 
themselves in the coarser work of the world! It is curiously inconsistent 
that with the emphasis which this generation has placed upon the mother 
and upon the prolongation of infancy, we constantly allow the waste of 
this most precious material. I cannot recall without indignation a recent 
experience. I was detained late one evening in an office building by a 
prolonged committee meeting of the Board of Education. As I came out at 
eleven o'clock, I met in the corridor of the fourteenth floor a woman whom 
I knew, on her knees scrubbing the marble tiling. As she straightened up 
to greet me, she seemed so wet from her feet up to her chin, that I 
hastily inquired the cause. Her reply was that she left home at five 
o'clock every night and had no opportunity for six hours to nurse her 
baby. Her mother's milk mingled with the very water with which she 
scrubbed the floors until she should return at midnight, heated and

Page 175

exhausted, to feed her screaming child with what remained within her 
breasts. 

These are only a few of the problems connected with the lives of the 
poorest people with whom the residents in a Settlement are constantly 
brought in contact. 

I cannot close this chapter without a reference to that gallant company of 
men and women among whom my acquaintance is so large, who are fairly 
indifferent to starvation itself because of their preoccupation with 
higher ends. Among them are visionaries and enthusiasts, unsuccessful 
artists, writers, and reformers. For many years at Hull-House, we knew a 
well-bred German woman who was completely absorbed in the experiment of 
expressing musical phrases and melodies by means of colors. Because she 
was small and deformed, she stowed herself into her trunk every night, 
where she slept on a canvas stretched hammock-wise from the four corners 
and her food was of the meagerest; nevertheless if a visitor left an 
offering upon her table, it was largely spent for apparatus or delicately 
colored silk floss, with which to pursue the fascinating experiment. 
Another sadly crippled old woman, the widow of a sea captain, although 
living almost exclusively upon malted milk tablets as affording a cheap 
form of prepared food, was always eager to talk of the beautiful 
illuminated manuscripts she had sought out in her travels and to show 
specimens of her own work as an illumi-

Page 176

nator. Still another of these impressive old women was an inveterate 
inventor. Although she had seen prosperous days in England, when we knew 
her, she subsisted largely upon the samples given away at the 
demonstration counters of the department stores, and on bits of food which 
she cooked on a coal shovel in the furnace of the apartment house whose 
basement back room she occupied. Although her inventions were not 
practicable, various experts to whom they were submitted always pronounced 
them suggestive and ingenious. I once saw her receive this complimentary 
verdict­"this ribbon to stick in her coat"­with such dignity and gravity 
that the words of condolence for her financial disappointment, died upon 
my lips. 

These indomitable souls are but three out of many whom I might instance to 
prove that those who are handicapped in the race for life's goods, 
sometimes play a magnificent trick upon the jade, life herself, by ceasing 
to know whether or not they possess any of her tawdry goods and chattels. 



Page 177

CHAPTER IX
A DECADE OF ECONOMIC DISCUSSION

THE Hull-House residents were often bewildered by the desire for constant 
discussion which characterized Chicago twenty years ago, for although the 
residents in the early Settlements were in many cases young persons who 
had sought relief from the consciousness of social maladjustment in the 
"anodyne of work" afforded by philanthropic and civic activities, their 
former experiences had not thrown them into company with radicals. The 
decade between 1890-1900 was, in Chicago, a period of propaganda as over 
against constructive social effort; the moment for marching and carrying 
banners, for stating general principles and making a demonstration, rather 
than the time for uncovering the situation and for providing the legal 
measures and the civic organization through which new social hopes might 
make themselves felt. 

When Hull-House was established in 1889, the events of the Haymarket riot 
were already two years old, but during that time Chicago had apparently 
gone through the first period of repressive measures, and in the winter of 
1889-1890, by the advice and with the active participation of its lead-

Page 178

ing citizens, the city had reached the conclusion that the only cure for 
the acts of anarchy was free speech and an open discussion of the ills of 
which the opponents of government complained. Great open meetings were 
held every Sunday evening in the recital hall of the then new auditorium, 
presided over by such representative citizens as Lyman Gage, and every 
possible shade of opinion was freely expressed. A man who spoke constantly 
at these meetings used to be pointed out to the visiting stranger as one 
who had been involved with the group of convicted anarchists, and who 
doubtless would have been arrested and tried, but for the accident of his 
having been in Milwaukee when the explosion occurred. One cannot imagine 
such meetings being held in Chicago to-day, nor that such a man should be 
encouraged to raise his voice in a public assemblage presided over by a 
leading banker. It is hard to tell just what change has come over our 
philosophy or over the minds of those citizens who were then convinced 
that if these conferences had been established earlier, the Haymarket riot 
and all its sensational results might have been avoided 

At any rate, there seemed a further need for smaller clubs, where men who 
differed widely in their social theories might meet for discussion, where 
representatives of the various economic schools might modify each other, 
and at least learn tolerance and the futility of endeavoring to con-

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vince all the world of the truth of one position. Fanaticism is engendered 
only when men, finding no contradiction to their theories, at last believe 
that the very universe lends itself as an exemplification of one point of 
view. "The Working People's Social Science Club" was organized at Hull-
House in the spring of 1890 by an English workingman, and for seven years 
it held a weekly meeting. At eight o'clock every Wednesday night the 
secretary called to order from forty to one hundred people; a chairman for 
the evening was elected, a speaker was introduced who was allowed to talk 
until nine o'clock; his subject was then thrown open to discussion and a 
lively debate ensued until ten o'clock, at which hour the meeting was 
declared adjourned. The enthusiasm of this club seldom lagged. Its zest 
for discussion was unceasing, and any attempt to turn it into a study or 
reading club always met with the strong disapprobation of the members. 

In these weekly discussions in the Hull-House drawing room everything was 
thrown back upon general principles and all discussion save that which 
"went to the root of things," was impatiently discarded as an unworthy, 
halfway measure. I recall one evening in this club when an exasperated 
member had thrown out the statement that "Mr. B. believes that socialism 
will cure the toothache." Mr. B. promptly rose to his feet and said that 
it certainly would, that when every child's teeth were

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systematically cared for from the beginning, toothaches would disappear 
from the face of the earth, belonging, as it did, to the extinct 
competitive order, as the black plague had disappeared from the earth with 
the ill-regulated feudal regime of the Middle Ages. "But," he added, "why 
do we spend time discussing trifles like the toothache when great social 
changes are to be considered which will of themselves reform these minor 
ills?" Even the man who had been humorous fell into the solemn tone of the 
gathering. It was, perhaps, here that the socialist surpassed everyone 
else in the fervor of economic discussion. He was usually a German or a 
Russian, with a turn for logical presentation, who saw in the 
concentration of capital and the growth of monopolies an inevitable 
transition to the socialist state. He pointed out that the concentration 
of capital in fewer hands but increased the mass of those whose interests 
were opposed to a maintenance of its power, and vastly simplified its 
final absorption by the community; that monopoly "when it is finished doth 
bring forth socialism." Opposite to him, springing up in every discussion 
was the individualist, or, as the socialist called him, the anarchist, who 
insisted that we shall never secure just human relations until we have 
equality of opportunity; that the sole function of the state is to 
maintain the freedom of each, guarded by the like freedom of all, in order 
that each man may be able to work out the problems of his own existence.

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That first winter was within three years of the Henry George campaign in 
New York, when his adherents all over the country were carrying on a 
successful and effective propaganda. When Henry George himself came to 
Hull-House one Sunday afternoon, the gymnasium which was already crowded 
with men to hear Father Huntington's address on "Why should a free thinker 
believe in Christ," fairly rocked on its foundations under the 
enthusiastic and prolonged applause which greeted this great leader and 
constantly interrupted his stirring address, filled, as all of his 
speeches were, with high moral enthusiasm and humanitarian fervor. Of the 
remarkable congresses held in connection with the World's Fair, perhaps 
those inaugurated by the advocates of single tax exceeded all others in 
vital enthusiasm. It was possibly significant that all discussions in the 
department of social science had to be organized by partisans in separate 
groups. The very com-

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mittee itself on social science composed of Chicago citizens, of whom I 
was one, changed from week to week, as partisan members had their feelings 
hurt because their cause did not receive "due recognition." And yet in the 
same building adherents of the most diverse religious creeds, eastern and 
western, met in amity and good fellowship. Did it perhaps indicate that 
their presentation of the eternal problems of life were cast in an older 
and less sensitive mold than this presentation in terms of social 
experience, or was it rather that the new social science was not yet a 
science at all but merely a name under cover of which we might discuss the 
perplexing problems of the industrial situation? Certainly the 
difficulties of our committee were not minimized by the fact that the then 
new science of sociology had not yet defined its own field. The University 
of Chicago, opened only the year before the World's Fair, was the first 
great institution of learning to institute a department of sociology. 

In the meantime the Hull-House Social Science Club grew in numbers and 
fervor as various distinguished people who were visiting the World's Fair 
came to address it. I recall a brilliant Frenchwoman who was filled with 
amazement because one of the shabbiest men reflected a reading of 
Schopenhauer. She considered the statement of another member most 
remarkable­that when he saw a carriage driving through the streets 
occupied by a capitalist who was no longer even an entrepreneur,

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he felt quite as sure that his days were numbered and that his very lack 
of function to society would speedily bring him to extinction, as he did 
when he saw a drunkard reeling along the same street. 

The club at any rate convinced the residents that no one so poignantly 
realizes the failures in the social structure as the man at the bottom, 
who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered 
most. I recall the shrewd comments of a certain sailor who had known the 
disinherited in every country; of a Russian who had served his term in 
Siberia; of an old Irishman who called himself an atheist but who in 
moments of excitement always blamed the good Lord for "setting supinely" 
when the world was so horribly out of joint. 

It was doubtless owing largely to this club that Hull-House contracted its 
early reputation for radicalism. Visitors refused to distinguish between 
the sentiments expressed by its members in the heat of discussion and the 
opinions held by the residents themselves. At that moment in Chicago the 
radical of every shade of opinion was vigorous and dogmatic; of the sort 
that could not resign himself to the slow march of human improvement; of 
the type who knew exactly "in what part of the world Utopia standeth." 

During this decade Chicago seemed divided into two classes; those who held 
that "business is business" and who were therefore annoyed at the very

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notion of social control, and the radicals, who claimed that nothing could 
be done to really moralize the industrial situation until society should 
be reorganized. 

A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which those 
who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and opportunities 
are early attracted. It is this type of mind which is in itself so often 
obnoxious to the man of conquering business faculty, to whom the practical 
world of affairs seems so supremely rational that he would never vote to 
change the type of it even if he could. The man of social enthusiasm is to 
him an annoyance and an affront. He does not like to hear him talk and 
considers him per se "unsafe." Such a business man would admit, as an 
abstract proposition, that society is susceptible of modification and 
would even agree that all human institutions imply progressive 
development, but at the same time he deeply distrusts those who seek to 
reform existing conditions. There is a certain common-sense foundation for 
this distrust, 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. When such a rebel poses for a reformer, his shortcomings are 
heralded to the world, and his downfall is cherished as an awful warning 
to those who refuse to worship "the god of things as they are."

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And yet as I recall the members of this early club, even those who talked 
the most and the least rationally, seem to me to have been particularly 
kindly and "safe." The most pronounced anarchist among them has long since 
become a convert to a religious sect, holding Buddhistic tenets which 
imply little food and a distrust of all action; he has become a wraith of 
his former self but he still retains his kindly smile. 

In the discussion of these themes, Hull-House was of course quite as much 
under the suspicion of one side as the other. I remember one night when I 
addressed a club of secularists, which met at the corner of South Halsted 
and Madison streets, a rough-looking man called out: "You are all right 
now, but, mark my words, when you are subsidized by the millionaires, you 
will be afraid to talk like this." The defense of free speech was a 
sensitive point with me, and I quickly replied that while I did not intend 
to be subsidized by millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by 
workingmen, and that I should state my honest opinion without consulting 
either of them. To my surprise, the audience of radicals broke into 
applause, and the discussion turned upon the need of resisting tyranny 
wherever found, if democratic institutions were to endure. This desire to 
bear independent witness to social righteousness often resulted in a sense 
of compromise difficult to endure, and at many times it seemed to me that 
we were destined to

Page 186

alienate everybody. I should have been most grateful at that time to 
accept the tenets of socialism, and I conscientiously made my effort, both 
by reading and by many discussions with the comrades. I found that I could 
easily give an affirmative answer to the heated question "Don't you see 
that just as the hand mill created a society with a feudal lord, so the 
steam mill creates a society with an industrial capitalist?" But it was a 
little harder to give an affirmative reply to the proposition that the 
social relation thus established proceeds to create principles, ideas and 
categories as merely historical and transitory products. 

Of course I use the term "socialism" technically and do not wish to 
confuse it with the growing sensitiveness which recognizes that no 
personal comfort, nor individual development can compensate a man for the 
misery of his neighbors, nor with the increasing conviction that social 
arrangements can be transformed through man's conscious and deliberate 
effort. Such a definition would not have been accepted for a moment by the 
Russians, who then dominated the socialist party in Chicago and among whom 
a crude interpretation of the class conflict was the test of faith. 

During those first years on Halsted Street nothing was more painfully 
clear than the fact that pliable human nature is relentlessly pressed upon 
by its physical environment. I saw nowhere a more devoted effort to 
understand and relieve that

Page 187

heavy pressure than the socialists were making, and I should have been 
glad to have had the comradeship of that gallant company had they not 
firmly insisted that fellowship depends upon identity of creed. They 
repudiated similarity of aim and social sympathy as tests which were much 
too loose and wavering as they did that vague socialism which for 
thousands has come to be a philosophy or rather religion embodying the 
hope of the world and the protection of all who suffer. 

I also longed for the comfort of a definite social creed, which should 
afford at one and the same time an explanation of the social chaos and the 
logical steps towards its better ordering. I came to have an exaggerated 
sense of responsibility for the poverty in the midst of which I was living 
and which the socialists constantly forced me to defend. My plight was not 
unlike that which might have resulted in my old days of skepticism 
regarding foreordination, had I then been compelled to defend the 
confusion arising from the clashing of free wills as an alternative to an 
acceptance of the doctrine. Another difficulty in the way of accepting 
this economic determinism, so baldly dependent upon the theory of class 
consciousness, constantly arose when I lectured in country towns and there 
had opportunities to read human documents of prosperous people as well as 
those of my neighbors who were crowded into the city. The former were 
stoutly unconscious of any classes in America, and

Page 188

the class consciousness of the immigrants was fast being broken into by 
the necessity for making new and unprecedented connections in the 
industrial life all about them. 

In the meantime, although many men of many minds met constantly at our 
conferences, it was amazing to find the incorrigible good nature which 
prevailed. Radicals are accustomed to hot discussion and sharp differences 
of opinion and take it all in the day's work. I recall that the secretary 
of the Hull-House Social Science Club at the anniversary of the seventh 
year of its existence read a report in which he stated that, so far as he 
could remember, but twice during that time had a speaker lost his temper, 
and in each case it had been a college professor who "wasn't accustomed to 
being talked back to." 

He also added that but once had all the club members united in applauding 
the same speaker; only Samuel Jones, who afterwards became the "golden 
rule" mayor of Toledo, had been able to overcome all their dogmatic 
differences, when he had set forth a plan of endowing a group of 
workingmen with a factory plant and a working capital for experimentation 
in hours and wages, quite as groups of scholars are endowed for research. 

Chicago continued to devote much time to economic discussion and remained 
in a state of youthful glamour throughout the nineties. I recall a

Page 189

young Methodist minister who, in order to free his denomination from any 
entanglement in his discussion of the economic and social situation, moved 
from his church building into a neighboring hall. The congregation and 
many other people followed him there, and he later took to the street 
corners because he found that the shabbiest men liked that best. Professor 
Herron filled to overflowing a downtown hall every noon with a series of 
talks entitled "Between Caesar and Jesus"­an attempt to apply the 
teachings of the Gospel to the situations of modern commerce. A half dozen 
publications edited with some ability and much moral enthusiasm have 
passed away, perhaps because they represented pamphleteering rather than 
journalism and came to a natural end when the situation changed. Certainly 
their editors suffered criticism and poverty on behalf of the causes which 
they represented. 

Trades-unionists, unless they were also socialists, were not prominent in 
those economic discussions, although they were steadily making an effort 
to bring order into the unnecessary industrial confusion. They belonged to 
the second of the two classes into which Mill divides all those who are 
dissatisfied with human life as it is, and whose feelings are wholly 
identified with its radical amendment. He states that the thoughts of one 
class are in the region of ultimate aims, of "the highest ideals of human 
life," while the thoughts of the other are

Page 190

in the region of the "immediately useful, and practically attainable." 

The meetings of our Social Science Club were carried on by men of the 
former class, many of them with a strong religious bias who constantly 
challenged the Church to assuage the human spirit thus torn and bruised 
"in the tumult of a time disconsolate." These men were so serious in their 
demand for religious fellowship, and several young clergymen were so ready 
to respond to the appeal, that various meetings were arranged at Hull-
House, in which a group of people met together to consider the social 
question, not in a spirit of discussion, but in prayer and meditation. 
These clergymen were making heroic efforts to induce their churches to 
formally consider the labor situation, and during the years which have 
elapsed since then, many denominations of the Christian Church have 
organized labor committees; but at that time there was nothing of the sort 
beyond the society in the established Church of England "to consider the 
conditions of labor." 

During that decade even the most devoted of that pioneer church society 
failed to formulate the fervid desire for juster social conditions into 
anything more convincing than a literary statement, and the Christian 
Socialists, at least when the American branch held its annual meeting at 
Hull-House, afforded but a striking portrayal of that "between-age mood" 
in which so many of our religious con-

Page 191

temporaries are forced to live. I remember that I received the same 
impression when I attended a meeting called by the canon of an English 
cathedral to discuss the relation of the Church to labor. The men quickly 
indicted the cathedral for its uselessness, and the canon asked them what 
in their minds should be its future. The men promptly replied that any new 
social order would wish, of course, to preserve beautiful historic 
buildings, that although they would dismiss the bishop and all the clergy, 
they would want to retain one or two scholars as custodians and 
interpreters. "And what next?" the imperturbable ecclesiastic asked. "We 
would democratize it," replied the men. But when it came to a more 
detailed description of such an undertaking, the discussion broke down 
into a dozen bits, although illuminated by much shrewd wisdom and 
affording a clue, perhaps as to the destruction of the bishop's palace by 
the citizens of this same town, who had attacked it as a symbol of swollen 
prosperity during the bread riots of the earlier part of the century. 

On the other hand the workingmen who continue to demand help from the 
Church thereby acknowledge their kinship, as does the son who continues to 
ask bread from the father who gives him a stone. I recall an incident 
connected with a prolonged strike in Chicago on the part of the 
typographical unions for an eight-hour day. The strike had been conducted 
in a most orderly manner

Page 192

and the union men, convinced of the justice of their cause, had felt 
aggrieved because one of the religious publishing houses in Chicago had 
constantly opposed them. Some of the younger clergymen of the 
denominations who were friendly to the strikers' cause came to a luncheon 
at Hull-House, where the situation was discussed by the representatives of 
all sides. The clergymen, becoming much interested in the idealism with 
which an officer of the State Federation of Labor presented the cause, 
drew from him the story of his search for fraternal relation: he said that 
at fourteen years of age he had joined a church, hoping to find it there; 
he had later become a member of many fraternal organizations and mutual 
benefit societies, and, although much impressed by their rituals, he was 
disappointed in the actual fraternity. He had finally found, so it seemed 
to him, in the cause of organized labor, what these other organizations 
had failed to give him­an opportunity for sacrificial effort. 

Chicago thus took a decade to discuss the problems inherent in the present 
industrial organization and to consider what might be done, not so much 
against deliberate aggression as against brutal confusion and neglect; 
quite as the youth of promise passed through a mist of rose-colored hope 
before he settles in the land of achievement where he becomes all too dull 
and literal minded. And yet as I hastily review the decade in Chicago

Page 193

which followed this one given over to discussion, the actual attainment of 
these early hopes, so far as they have been realized at all, seem to have 
come from men of affairs rather than from those given to speculation. Was 
the whole decade of discussion an illustration of that striking fact which 
has been likened to the changing of swords in Hamlet; that the abstract 
minds at length yield to the inevitable or at least grow less ardent in 
their propaganda, while the concrete minds, dealing constantly with daily 
affairs, in the end demonstrate the reality of abstract notions? 

I remember when Frederick Harrison visited Hull-House that I was much 
disappointed to find that the Positivists had not made their ardor for 
humanity a more potent factor in the English social movement, as I was 
surprised during a visit from John Morley to find that he, representing 
perhaps the type of man whom political life seemed to have pulled away 
from the ideals of his youth, had yet been such a champion of democracy in 
the full tide of reaction. My observations were much too superficial to be 
of value and certainly both men were well grounded in philosophy and 
theory of social reform and had long before carefully formulated their 
principles, as the new English Labor Party, which is destined to break up 
the reactionary period, is now being created by another set of theorists. 
There were certainly moments during the heated discussions of this decade 
when nothing

Page 194

seemed so important as right theory: this was borne in upon me one 
brilliant evening at Hull-House when Benjamin Kidd, author of the much-
read "Social Evolution," was pitted against Victor Berger of Milwaukee, 
even then considered a rising man in the Socialist Party. 

At any rate the residents of Hull-House discovered that while their first 
impact with city poverty allied them to groups given over to discussion of 
social theories , their sober efforts to heal neighborhood ills allied 
them to general public movements which were without challenging creeds. 
But while we discovered that we most easily secured the smallest of much-
needed improvements by attaching our efforts to those of organized bodies, 
nevertheless these very organizations would have been impossible, had not 
the public conscience been aroused and the community sensibility quickened 
by these same ardent theorists. 

As I review these very first impressions of the workers in unskilled 
industries, living in a depressed quarter of the city, I realize how easy 
it was for us to see exceptional cases of hardship as typical of the 
average lot, and yet, in spite of alleviating philanthropy and labor 
legislation, the indictment of Tolstoy applied to Moscow thirty years ago 
still fits every American city: "Wherever we may live, if we draw a circle 
around us of a hundred thousand, or a thousand, or even of ten miles 
circumference, and look at the lives of those men and women who

Page 195

are inside our circle, we shall find half-starved children, old people, 
pregnant women, sick and weak persons, working beyond their strength, who 
have neither food nor rest enough to support them, and who, for this 
reason, die before their time; we shall see others, full grown, who are 
injured and needlessly killed by dangerous and hurtful tasks." 

As the American city is awakening to self-consciousness, it slowly 
perceives the civic significance of these industrial conditions, and 
perhaps Chicago has been foremost in the effort to connect the unregulated 
overgrowth of the huge centers of population, with the astonishingly rapid 
development of industrial enterprises; quite as Chicago was foremost to 
carry on the preliminary discussion through which a basis was laid for 
likemindedness and the coördination of diverse wills. I remember an astute 
English visitor, who had been a guest in a score of American cities, 
observed that it was hard to understand the local pride he constantly 
encountered; for in spite of the boasting on the part of leading citizens 
in the western, eastern, and southern towns, all American cities seemed to 
him essentially alike and all equally the results of an industry totally 
unregulated by well-considered legislation. 

I am inclined to think that perhaps all this general discussion was 
inevitable in connection with the early Settlements, as they in turn were 
the inevitable result of theories of social reform, which

Page 196

in their full enthusiasm reached America by way of England, only in the 
last decade of the century. There must have been tough fiber somewhere; 
for, although the residents of Hull-House were often baffled by the 
radicalism within the Social Science Club and harassed by the criticism 
from outside, we still continued to believe that such discussion should be 
carried on, for if the Settlement seeks its expression through social 
activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and 
spiritual impulse. 

The group of Hull-House residents, which by the end of the decade 
comprised twenty-five, differed widely in social beliefs, from the girl 
direct from the country who looked upon all social unrest as mere anarchy, 
to the resident, who had become a socialist when a student in Zurich, and 
who had long before translated from the German Engel's "Conditions of the 
Working Class in England," although at this time she had been read out of 
the Socialist Party because the Russian and German Impossibilists 
suspected her fluent English, as she always lightly explained. Although 
thus diversified in social beliefs, the residents became solidly united 
through our mutual experience in an industrial quarter, and we became not 
only convinced of the need for social control and protective legislation 
but also of the value of this preliminary argument. 

This decade of discussion between 1890 and 1900 already seems remote from 
the spirit of Chicago of

Page 197

to-day. So far as I have been able to reproduce this earlier period, it 
must reflect the essential provisionality of everything; "the perpetual 
moving on to something future which shall supersede the present," that 
paramount impression of life itself, which affords us at one and the same 
time, ground for despair and for endless and varied anticipation.