Twenty Years at Hull-House - Chapters X-XI



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CHAPTER X
PIONEER LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS

OUR very first Christmas at Hull-House, when we as yet knew nothing of 
child labor, a number of little girls refused the candy which was offered 
them as part of the Christmas good cheer, saying simply that they "worked 
in a candy factory and could not bear the sight of it." We discovered that 
for six weeks they had worked from seven in the morning until nine at 
night, and they were exhausted as well as satiated. The sharp 
consciousness of stern economic conditions was thus thrust upon us in the 
midst of the season of good will. 

During the same winter three boys from a Hull-House club were injured at 
one machine in a neighboring factory for lack of a guard which would have 
cost but a few dollars. When the injury of one of these boys resulted in 
his death, we felt quite sure that the owners of the factory would share 
our horror and remorse, and that they would do everything possible to 
prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy. To our surprise they did nothing 
whatever, and I made my first acquaintance then with those pathetic 
documents signed by the 

[image caption: SWEATSHOP WORKERS.]

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parents of working children, that they will make no claim for damages 
resulting from "carelessness." 

The visits we made in the neighborhood constantly discovered women sewing 
upon sweatshop work, and often they were assisted by incredibly small 
children. I remember a little girl of four who pulled out basting threads 
hour after hour, sitting on a stool at the feet of her Bohemian mother, a 
little bunch of human misery. But even for that there was no legal 
redress, for the only child-labor law in Illinois, with any provision for 
enforcement, had been secured by the coal miners' unions, and was confined 
to children employed in mines. 

We learned to know many families in which the working children contributed 
to the support of their parents, not only because they spoke English 
better than the older immigrants and were willing to take lower wages, but 
because their parents gradually found it easy to live upon their earnings. 
A South Italian peasant who has picked olives and packed oranges from his 
toddling babyhood cannot see at once the difference between the outdoor 
healthy work which he had performed in the varying seasons, and the long 
hours of monotonous factory life which his child encounters when he goes 
to work in Chicago. An Italian father came to us in great grief over the 
death of his eldest child, a little girl of twelve, who had brought the 
largest wages into the family fund. In the midst of his

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genuine sorrow he said: "She was the oldest kid I had. Now I shall have to 
go back to work again until the next one is able to take care of me." The 
man was only thirty-three and had hoped to retire from work at least 
during the winters. No foreman cared to have him in a factory, untrained 
and unintelligent as he was. It was much easier for his bright, English-
speaking little girl to get a chance to paste labels on a box than for him 
to secure an opportunity to carry pig iron. The effect on the child was 
what no one concerned thought about, in the abnormal effort she made thus 
prematurely to bear the weight of life. Another little girl of thirteen, a 
Russian-Jewish child employed in a laundry at a heavy task beyond her 
strength, committed suicide, because she had borrowed three dollars from a 
companion which she could not repay unless she confided the story to her 
parents and gave up an entire week's wages­but what could the family live 
upon that week in case she did! Her child mind, of course, had no sense of 
proportion, and carbolic acid appeared inevitable. 

While we found many pathetic cases of child labor and hard-driven victims 
of the sweating system who could not possibly earn enough in the short 
busy season to support themselves during the rest of the year, it became 
evident that we must add carefully collected information to our general 
impression of neighborhood conditions if we would make it of any genuine 
value.

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There was at that time no statistical information on Chicago industrial 
conditions, and Mrs. Florence Kelley, an early resident of Hull-House, 
suggested to the Illinois State Bureau of Labor that they investigate the 
sweating system in Chicago with its attendant child labor. The head of the 
Bureau adopted this suggestion and engaged Mrs. Kelley to make the 
investigation. When the report was presented to the Illinois Legislature, 
a special committee was appointed to look into the Chicago conditions. I 
well recall that on the Sunday the members of this commission came to dine 
at Hull-House, our hopes ran high, and we believed that at last some of 
the worst ills under which our neighbors were suffering would be brought 
to an end. 

As a result of its investigations, this committee recommended to the 
Legislature the provisions which afterward became those of the first 
factory law of Illinois, regulating the sanitary conditions of the 
sweatshop and fixing fourteen as the age at which a child might be 
employed. Before the passage of the law could be secured, it was necessary 
to appeal to all elements of the community, and a little group of us 
addressed the open meetings of trades-unions and of benefit societies, 
church organizations, and social clubs literally every evening for three 
months. Of course the most energetic help as well as intelligent 
understanding came from the trades-unions. The central labor body of Chi-

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cago, then called the Trades and Labor Assembly, had previously appointed 
a committee of investigation to inquire into the sweating system. This 
committee consisted of five delegates from the unions and five outside 
their membership. Two of the latter were residents of Hull-House, and 
continued with the unions in their well-conducted campaign until the 
passage of Illinois's first Factory Legislation was secured, a statute 
which has gradually been built upon by many public-spirited citizens until 
Illinois stands well among the States, at least in the matter of 
protecting her children. The Hull-House residents that winter had their 
first experience in lobbying. I remember that I very much disliked the 
word and still more the prospect of the lobbying itself, and we insisted 
that well-known Chicago women should accompany this first little group of 
Settlement folk who with trades-unionists moved upon the state capitol in 
behalf of factory legislation. The national or, to use its formal name, 
The General Federation of Woman's Clubs had been organized in Chicago only 
the year before this legislation was secured. The Federation was then 
timid in regard to all legislation because it was anxious not to frighten 
its new membership, although its second president, Mrs. Henrotin, was most 
untiring in her efforts to secure this law. 

It was, perhaps, a premature effort, though certainly founded upon a 
genuine need, to urge that a

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clause limiting the hours of all women working in factories or workshops 
to eight a day, or forty-eight a week, should be inserted in the first 
factory legislation of the State. Although we had lived at Hull-House but 
three years when we urged this legislation, we had known a large number of 
young girls who were constantly exhausted by night work; for whatever may 
be said in defense of night work for men, few women are able to endure it. 
A man who works by night sleeps regularly by day, but a woman finds it 
impossible to put aside the household duties which crowd upon her, and a 
conscientious girl finds it hard to sleep with her mother washing and 
scrubbing within a few feet of her bed. One of the most painful 
impressions of those first years is that of pale, listless girls, who 
worked regularly in a factory of the vicinity which was then running full 
night time. These girls also encountered a special danger in the early 
morning hours as they returned from work, debilitated and exhausted, and 
only too easily convinced that a drink and a little dancing at the end of 
the balls in the saloon dance halls, was what they needed to brace them. 
One of the girls whom we then knew, whose name, Chloe, seemed to fit her 
delicate charm, craving a drink to dispel her lassitude before her tired 
feet should take the long walk home, had thus been decoyed into a saloon, 
where the soft drink was followed by an alcoholic one containing "knockout 
drops," and she awoke in a disreputable rooming

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house­too frightened and disgraced to return to her mother. 

Thus confronted by that old conundrum of the interdependence of matter and 
spirit, the conviction was forced upon us that long and exhausting hours 
of work are almost sure to be followed by lurid and exciting pleasures; 
that the power to overcome temptation reaches its limit almost 
automatically with that of physical resistance. The eight-hour clause in 
this first factory law met with much less opposition in the Legislature 
than was anticipated, and was enforced for a year before it was pronounced 
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Illinois. During the halcyon 
months when it was a law, a large and enthusiastic Eight-Hour Club of 
working women met at Hull-House, to read the literature on the subject and 
in every way to prepare themselves to make public sentiment in favor of 
the measure which meant so much to them. The adverse decision in the test 
case, the progress of which they had most intelligently followed, was a 
matter of great disappointment. The entire experience left on my mind a 
mistrust of all legislation which was not preceded by full discussion and 
understanding. A premature measure may be carried through a legislature by 
perfectly legitimate means and still fail to possess vitality and a sense 
of maturity. On the other hand, the administration of an advanced law acts 
somewhat as a referendum. The people have an opportunity for

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two years to see the effects of its operation. If they choose to reopen 
the matter at the next General Assembly, it can be discussed with 
experience and conviction; the very operation of the law has performed the 
function of the "referendum" in a limited use of the term. 

Founded upon some such compunction, the sense that the passage of the 
child labor law would in many cases work hardship, was never absent from 
my mind during the earliest years of its operation. I addressed as many 
mothers' meetings and clubs among working women as I could, in order to 
make clear the object of the law and the ultimate benefit to themselves as 
well as to their children. I am happy to remember that I never met with 
lack of understanding among the hard-working widows, in whose behalf many 
prosperous people were so eloquent. These widowed mothers would say, "Why, 
of course, that is what I am working for­to give the children a chance. I 
want them to have more education than I had"; or another, "That is why we 
came to America, and I don't want to spoil his start, even although his 
father is dead"; or "It's different in America. A boy gets left if he 
isn't educated." There was always a willingness, even among the poorest 
women, to keep on with the hard night scrubbing or the long days of 
washing for the children's sake. 

The bitterest opposition to the law came from the large glass companies, 
who were so accustomed

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to use the labor of children that they were convinced the manufacturing of 
glass could not be carried on without it. 

Fifteen years ago the State of Illinois, as well as Chicago, exhibited 
many characteristics of the pioneer country in which untrammeled energy 
and an "early start" were still the most highly prized generators of 
success. Although this first labor legislation was but bringing Illinois 
into line with the nations in the modern industrial world, which "have 
long been obliged for their own sakes to come to the aid of the workers by 
which they live­that the child, the young person and the woman may be 
protected from their own weakness and necessity­" nevertheless from the 
first it ran counter to the instinct and tradition, almost to the very 
religion of the manufacturers of the state, who were for the most part 
self-made men. 

This first attempt in Illinois for adequate factory legislation also was 
associated in the minds of businessmen with radicalism, because the law 
was secured during the term of Governor Altgeld and was first enforced 
during his administration. While nothing in its genesis or spirit could be 
further from "anarchy" than factory legislation, and while the first law 
in Illinois was still far behind Massachusetts and New York, the fact that 
Governor Altgeld pardoned from the state's prison the anarchists who had 
been sentenced there after the Haymarket riot, gave the opponents of this 
most reasonable

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legislation a quickly utilized opportunity to couple it with that detested 
word; the State document which accompanied Governor Altgeld's pardon gave 
these ungenerous critics a further opportunity, because a magnanimous 
action was marred by personal rancor, betraying for the moment the 
infirmity of a noble mind. For all of these reasons this first 
modification of the undisturbed control of the aggressive captains of 
industry could not be enforced without resistance marked by dramatic 
episodes and revolts. The inception of the law had already become 
associated with Hull-House, and when its ministration was also centered 
there, we inevitably received all the odium which these first efforts 
entailed. Mrs. Kelley was appointed the first factory inspector with a 
deputy and a force of twelve inspectors to enforce the law. Both Mrs. 
Kelley and her assistant, Mrs. Stevens, lived at Hull-House; the office 
was on Polk Street directly opposite, and one of the most vigorous 
deputies was the president of the Jane Club. In addition, one of the early 
men residents, since dean of a state law school, acted as prosecutor in 
the cases brought against the violators of the law. 

Chicago had for years been notoriously lax in the administration of law, 
and the enforcement of an unpopular measure was resented equally by the 
president of a large manufacturing concern and by the former victim of a 
sweatshop who had started a place of his own. Whatever the sentiments

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toward the new law on the part of the employers, there was no doubt of its 
enthusiastic reception by the trades-unions, as the securing of the law 
had already come from them, and through the years which have elapsed 
since, the experience of the Hull-House residents would coincide with that 
of an English statesman who said that "a common rule for the standard of 
life and the condition of labor may be secured by legislation, but it must 
be maintained by trades unionism." 

This special value of the trades-unions first became clear to the 
residents of Hull-House in connection with the sweating system. We early 
found that the women in the sewing trades were sorely in need of help. The 
trade was thoroughly disorganized, Russian and Polish tailors competing

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against English-speaking tailors, unskilled Bohemian and Italian women 
competing against both. These women seem to have been best helped through 
the use of the label when unions of specialized workers in the trade are 
strong enough to insist that the manufacturers shall "give out work" only 
to those holding union cards. It was certainly impressive when the garment 
makers themselves in this way finally succeeded in organizing six hundred 
of the Italian women in our immediate vicinity, who had finished garments 
at home for the most wretched and precarious wages. To be sure, the most 
ignorant women only knew that "you couldn't get clothes to sew" from the 
places where they paid the best, unless "you had a card," but through the 
veins of most of them there pulsed the quickened blood of a new 
fellowship, a sense of comfort and aid which had been laid out to them by 
their fellow-workers. 

During the fourth year of our residence at Hull-House we found ourselves 
in a large mass meeting ardently advocating the passage of a Federal 
measure called the Sulzer Bill. Even in our short struggle with the evils 
of the sweating system it did not seem strange that the center of the 
effort had shifted to Washington, for by that time we had realized that 
the sanitary regulation of sweatshops by city officials, and a careful 
enforcement of factory legislation by state factory inspectors will not 
avail, unless each city and State shall be able

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to pass and enforce a code of comparatively uniform legislation. Although 
the Sulzer Act failed to utilize the Interstate Commerce legislation for 
its purpose, many of the national representatives realized for the first 
time that only by federal legislation could their constituents in remote 
country places be protected from contagious diseases raging in New York or 
Chicago, for many country doctors testify as to the outbreak of scarlet 
fever in rural neighborhoods after the children have begun to wear the 
winter overcoats and cloaks which have been sent from infected city 
sweatshops. 

Through our efforts to modify the sweating system, the Hull-House 
residents gradually became committed to the fortunes of the Consumers' 
League, an organization which for years has been approaching the question 
of the underpaid sewing woman from the point of view of the ultimate 
responsibility lodged in the consumer. It becomes more reasonable to make 
the presentation of the sweatshop situation through this League, as it is 
more effectual to work with them for the extension of legal provisions in 
the slow upbuilding of that code of legislation which is alone sufficient 
to protect the home from the dangers incident to the sweating system. 

The Consumers' League seems to afford the best method of approach for the 
protection of girls in department stores; I recall a group of girls from a 
neighboring "emporium" who applied to Hull-

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House for dancing parties on alternate Sunday afternoons. In reply to our 
protest they told us they not only worked late every evening, in spite of 
the fact that each was supposed to have "two nights a week off," and every 
Sunday morning, but that on alternate Sunday afternoons they were required 
"to sort the stock." Over and over again, meetings called by the Clerks 
Union and others have been held at Hull-House protesting against these 
incredibly long hours. Little modification has come about, however, during 
our twenty years of residence, although one large store in the Bohemian 
quarter closes all day on Sunday and many of the others for three nights a 
week. In spite of the Sunday work, these girls prefer the outlying 
department stores to those downtown; there is more social intercourse with 
the customers, more kindliness and social equality between the saleswomen 
and the managers, and above all the girls have the protection naturally 
afforded by friends and neighbors and they are free from that suspicion 
which so often haunts the girls downtown, that their fellow workers may 
not be "nice girls." 

In the first years of Hull-House we came across no trades-unions among the 
women workers, and I think, perhaps, that only one union, composed solely 
of women, was to be found in Chicago then­that of the bookbinders. I 
easily recall the evening when the president of this pioneer organization 
accepted an invitation to take dinner at Hull-House.

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She came in rather a recalcitrant mood, expecting to be patronized, and so 
suspicious of our motives that it was only after she had been persuaded to 
become a guest of the house for several weeks in order to find out about 
us for herself, that she was convinced of our sincerity and of the ability 
of "outsiders" to be of any service to working women. She afterward became 
closely identified with Hull-House, and her hearty coöperation was assured 
until she moved to Boston and became a general organizer for the American 
Federation of Labor. 

The women shirt makers and the women cloak makers were both organized at 
Hull-House as was also the Dorcas Federal Labor Union, which had been 
founded through the efforts of a working woman, then one of the residents. 
The latter union met once a month in our drawing room. It was composed of 
representatives from all the unions in the city which included women in 
their membership and also received other women in sympathy with unionism. 
It was accorded representation in the central labor body of the city, and 
later it joined its efforts with those of others to found the Woman's 
Union Label League. In what we considered a praiseworthy effort to unite 
it with other organizations, the president of a leading Woman's Club 
applied for membership. We were so sure of her election that she stood 
just outside of the drawing-room door, or, in trades-union language, "the 
wicket gate," while her name was

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voted upon. To our chagrin, she did not receive enough votes to secure her 
admission, not because the working girls, as they were careful to state, 
did not admire her, but because she "seemed to belong to the other side." 
Fortunately, the big-minded woman so thoroughly understood the vote and 
her interest in working women was so genuine that it was less than a 
decade afterward when she was elected to the presidency of the National 
Woman's Trades Union League. The incident and the sequel registers, 
perhaps, the change in Chicago toward the labor movement, the recognition 
of the fact that it is a general social movement concerning all members of 
society and not merely a class struggle. 

Some such public estimate of the labor movement was brought home to 
Chicago during several conspicuous strikes; at least labor legislation has 
twice been inaugurated because its need was thus made clear. After the 
Pullman strike various elements in the community were unexpectedly brought 
together that they might soberly consider and rectify the weakness in the 
legal structure which the strike had revealed. These citizens arranged for 
a large and representative convention to be held in Chicago on Industrial 
Conciliation and Arbitration. I served as secretary of the committee from 
the new Civic Federation having the matter in charge, and our hopes ran 
high when, as a result of the agitation, the Illinois legislature

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passed a law creating a State Board of Conciliation and Arbitration. But 
even a state board cannot accomplish more than public sentiment authorizes 
and sustains, and we might easily have been discouraged in those early 
days could we have foreseen some of the industrial disturbances which have 
since disgraced Chicago. This law embodied the best provisions of the then 
existing laws for the arbitration of industrial disputes. At the time the 
word arbitration was still a word to conjure with, and many Chicago 
citizens were convinced, not only of the danger and futility involved in 
the open warfare of opposing social forces, but further believed that the 
search for justice and righteousness in industrial relations was made 
infinitely more difficult thereby. 

The Pullman strike afforded much illumination to many Chicago people. 
Before it, there had been nothing in my experience to reveal that distinct 
cleavage of society, which a general strike at least momentarily affords. 
Certainly, during all those dark days of the Pullman strike, the growth of 
class bitterness was most obvious. The fact that the Settlement maintained 
avenues of intercourse with both sides seemed to give it opportunity for 
nothing but a realization of the bitterness and division along class 
lines. I had known Mr. Pullman and had seen his genuine pride and pleasure 
in the model town he had built with so much care; and I had an opportunity 
to talk to many of the Pull-

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man employees during the strike when I was sent from a so-called 
"Citizens' Arbitration Committee" to their first meetings held in a hall 
in the neighboring village of Kensington, and when I was invited to the 
modest supper tables laid in the model houses. The employees then expected 
a speedy settlement and no one doubted but that all the grievances 
connected with the "straw bosses" would be quickly remedied and that the 
benevolence which had built the model town would not fail them. They were 
sure that the "straw bosses" had misrepresented the state of affairs, for 
this very first awakening to class consciousness bore many traces of the 
servility on one side and the arrogance on the other which had so long 
prevailed in the model town. The entire strike demonstrated how often the 
outcome of far-reaching industrial disturbances is dependent upon the 
personal will of the employer or the temperament of a strike leader. Those 
familiar with strikes know only too well how much they are influenced by 
poignant domestic situations, by the troubled consciences of the minority 
directors, by the suffering women and children, by the keen excitement of 
the struggle, by the religious scruples sternly suppressed but 
occasionally asserting themselves, now on one side and now on the other, 
and by that undefined psychology of the crowd which we understand so 
little. All of these factors also influence the public and do much to 
determine popular sympathy and judgment. In

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the early days of the Pullman strike, as I was coming down in the elevator 
of the Auditorium hotel from one of the futile meetings of the Arbitration 
Committee, I met an acquaintance, who angrily said "that the strikers 
ought all to be shot." As I had heard nothing so bloodthirsty as this 
either from the most enraged capitalist or from the most desperate of the 
men, and was interested to find the cause of such a senseless outbreak, I 
finally discovered that the first ten thousand dollars which my 
acquaintance had ever saved, requiring, he said, years of effort from the 
time he was twelve years old until he was thirty, had been lost as the 
result of a strike; he clinched his argument that he knew what he was 
talking about, with the statement that "no one need expect him to have any 
sympathy with strikers or with their affairs." 

A very intimate and personal experience revealed, at least to myself, my 
constant dread of the spreading ill will. At the height of the sympathetic 
strike my oldest sister, who was convalescing from a long illness in a 
hospital near Chicago, became suddenly very much worse. While I was able 
to reach her at once, every possible obstacle of a delayed and blocked 
transportation system interrupted the journey of her husband and children 
who were hurrying to her bedside from a distant state. As the end drew 
nearer and I was obliged to reply to my sister's constant inquiries that 
her family had not yet come, I was filled with a pro-

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found apprehension lest her last hours should be touched with resentment 
toward those responsible for the delay; lest her unutterable longing 
should at the very end be tinged with bitterness. She must have divined 
what was in my mind, for at last she said each time after the repetition 
of my sad news: "I don't blame any one, I am not judging them." My heart 
was comforted and heavy at the same time; but how many more such moments 
of sorrow and death were being made difficult and lonely throughout the 
land, and how much would these experiences add to the lasting bitterness, 
that touch of self-righteousness which makes the spirit of forgiveness 
well-nigh impossible. 

When I returned to Chicago from the quiet country I saw the Federal troops 
encamped about the post office; almost everyone on Halsted Street wearing 
a white ribbon, the emblem of the strikers' side; the residents at Hull-
House divided in opinion as to the righteousness of this or that measure; 
and no one able to secure any real information as to which side was 
burning the cars. After the Pullman strike I made an attempt to analyze in 
a paper which I called The Modern King Lear the inevitable revolt of human 
nature against the plans Mr. Pullman had made for his employees, the 
miscarriage of which appeared to him such black ingratitude. It seemed to 
me unendurable not to make some effort to gather together the social 
implications of the failure of this benevolent employer and its relation to

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the demand for a more democratic administration of industry. Doubtless the 
paper represented a certain "excess of participation," to use a gentle 
phrase of Charles Lamb's in preference to a more emphatic one used by Mr. 
Pullman himself. The last picture of the Pullman strike which I distinctly 
recall was three years later when one of the strike leaders came to see 
me. Although out of work for most of the time since the strike, he had 
been undisturbed for six months in the repair shops of a street-car 
company, under an assumed name, but he had at that moment been discovered 
and dismissed. He was a superior type of English workingman, but as he 
stood there, broken and discouraged, believing himself so black-listed 
that his skill could never be used again, filled with sorrow over the loss 
of his wife who had recently died after an illness with distressing mental 
symptoms, realizing keenly the lack of the respectable way of living he 
had always until now been able to maintain, he seemed to me an epitome of 
the wretched human waste such a strike implies. I fervently hoped that the 
new arbitration law would prohibit in Chicago forever more such brutal and 
ineffective methods of settling industrial disputes. And yet even as early 
as 1896, we found the greatest difficulty in applying the arbitration law 
to the garment workers' strike, although it was finally accomplished after 
various mass meetings had urged it. The cruelty and waste of the strike as 
an implement for securing

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the most reasonable demands came to me at another time, during the long 
strike of the clothing cutters. They had protested, not only against 
various wrongs of their own, but against the fact that the tailors 
employed by the custom merchants were obliged to furnish their own 
workshops and thus bore a burden of rent which belonged to the employer. 
One of the leaders in this strike, whom I had known for several years as a 
sober, industrious, and unusually intelligent man, I saw gradually break 
down during the many trying weeks and at last suffer a complete moral 
collapse. 

He was a man of sensitive organization under the necessity, as is every 
leader during a strike, to address the same body of men day after day with 
an appeal sufficiently emotional to respond to their sense of injury; to 
receive callers at any hour of the day or night; to sympathize with all 
the distress of the strikers who see their families daily suffering; he 
must do it all with the sickening sense of the increasing privation in his 
own home, and in this case with the consciousness that failure was 
approaching nearer each day. This man, accustomed to the monotony of his 
workbench and suddenly thrown into a new situation, showed every sign of 
nervous fatigue before the final collapse came. He disappeared after the 
strike and I did not see him for ten years, but when he returned he 
immediately began talking about the old grievances which he had repeated 
so often that he could talk

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of nothing else. It was easy to recognize the same nervous symptoms which 
the broken-down lecturer exhibits who has depended upon the exploitation 
of his own experiences to keep himself going.  One of his stories was 
indeed pathetic. His employer, during the busy season, had met him one 
Sunday afternoon in Lincoln Park whither he had taken his three youngest 
children, one of whom had been ill. The employer scolded him for thus 
wasting his time and roughly asked why he had not taken home enough work 
to keep himself busy through the day. The story was quite credible because 
the residents of Hull-House have had many opportunities to see the worker 
driven ruthlessly during the season and left in idleness for long weeks 
afterward. We have slowly come to realize that periodical idleness as well 
as the payment of wages insufficient for maintenance of the manual worker 
in full industrial and domestic efficiency,

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stand economically on the same footing with the "sweated" industries, the 
overwork of women, and employment of children. 

But of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as 
unemployment, and it was inevitable that we should see much of it in a 
neighborhood where low rents attracted the poorly paid worker and many 
newly arrived immigrants who were first employed in gangs upon railroad 
extensions and similar undertakings. The sturdy peasants eager for work 
were either the victims of the padrone who fleeced them unmercifully, both 
in securing a place to work and then in supplying them with food, or they 
became the mere sport of unscrupulous employment agencies. Hull-House made 
an investigation both of the padrone and of the agencies in our immediate 
vicinity, and the outcome confirming what we already suspected, we eagerly 
threw ourselves into a movement to procure free employment bureaus under 
State control until a law authorizing such bureaus and giving the 
officials intrusted with their management power to regulate private 
employment agencies, passed the Illinois Legislature in 1899. The history 
of these bureaus demonstrates the tendency we all have to consider a legal 
enactment in itself an achievement and to grow careless in regard to its 
administration and actual results; for an investigation into the situation 
ten years later discovered that immigrants were still shame-

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fully imposed upon. A group of Bulgarians were found who had been sent to 
work in Arkansas where their services were not needed; they walked back to 
Chicago only to secure their next job in Oklahoma and to pay another 
railroad fare as well as another commission to the agency. Not only was 
there no method by which the men not needed in Arkansas could know that 
there was work in Oklahoma unless they came back to Chicago to find it 
out, but there was no certainty that they might not be obliged to walk 
back from Oklahoma because the Chicago agency had already sent out too 
many men. 

This investigation of the employment bureau resources of Chicago was 
undertaken by the League for the Protection of Immigrants, with whom it is 
possible for Hull-House to coöperate whenever an investigation of the 
immigrant colonies in our immediate neighborhood seems necessary, as was 
recently done in regard to the Greek colonies of Chicago. The 
superintendent of this League, Miss Grace Abbott, is a resident of Hull-
House and all of our later attempts to secure justice and opportunity for 
immigrants are much more effective through the League, and when we speak 
before a congressional committee in Washington concerning the needs of 
Chicago immigrants, we represent the League as well as our own neighbors. 

It is in connection with the first factory employment of newly arrived 
immigrants and the innum-

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erable difficulties attached to their first adjustment that some of the 
most profound industrial disturbances in Chicago have come about. Under 
any attempt at classification these strikes belong more to the general 
social movement than to the industrial conflict, for the strike is an 
implement used most rashly by unorganized labor who, after they are in 
difficulties, call upon the trades-unions for organization and direction. 
They are similar to those strikes which are inaugurated by the unions on 
behalf of unskilled labor. In neither case do the hastily organized unions 
usually hold after the excitement of the moment has subsided, and the most 
valuable result of such strikes is the expanding consciousness of the 
solidarity of the workers. This was certainly the result of the Chicago 
stockyard strike in 1905, inaugurated on behalf of the immigrant laborers 
and so conspicuously carried on without violence that, although twenty-two 
thousand workers were idle during the entire summer, there were fewer 
arrests in the stockyards district than the average summer months afford. 
However, the story of this strike should not be told from Hull-House, but 
from the University of Chicago Settlement, where Miss Mary McDowell 
performed such signal public service during that trying summer. It would 
be interesting to trace how much of the subsequent exposure of conditions 
and attempts at governmental control of this huge industry had their

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genesis in this first attempt of the unskilled workers to secure a higher 
standard of living. Certainly the industrial conflict when epitomized in a 
strike, centers public attention on conditions as nothing else can do. A 
strike is one of the most exciting episodes in modern life, and as it 
assumes the characteristics of a game, the entire population of a city 
becomes divided into two cheering sides. In such moments the fair-minded 
public, who ought to be depended upon as a referee, practically 
disappears. Anyone who tries to keep the attitude of nonpartisanship, 
which is perhaps an impossible one, is quickly under suspicion by both 
sides. At least that was the fate of a group of citizens appointed by the 
mayor of Chicago to arbitrate during the stormy teamsters' strike which 
occurred in 1905. We sat through a long Sunday afternoon in the mayor's 
office in the City Hall, talking first with the labor men and then with 
the group of capitalists. The undertaking was the more futile in that we 
were all practically the dupes of a new type of "industrial conspiracy" 
successfully inaugurated in Chicago by a close compact between the coal 
teamsters' union and the coal team owners' association, who had formed a 
kind of monopoly hitherto new to a monopoly-ridden public. 

The stormy teamsters' strike, ostensibly undertaken in defense of the 
garment workers, but really arising from causes so obscure and 
dishonorable that they have never yet been made public, was

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the culmination of a type of trades-unions which had developed in Chicago 
during the preceding decade in which corruption had flourished almost as 
openly as it had previously done in the City Hall. This corruption 
sometimes took the form of grafting after the manner of Samuel Parks in 
New York; sometimes that of political deals in the "delivery of the labor 
vote"; and sometimes that of a combination between capital and labor 
hunting together. At various times during these years the better type of 
trades-unionists had made a firm stand against this corruption and a 
determined effort to eradicate it from the labor movement, not unlike the 
general reform effort of many American cities against political 
corruption. This reform movement in the Chicago Federation of Labor had 
its martyrs, and more than one man nearly lost his life through the 
"slugging" methods employed by the powerful corruptionists. And yet even 
in the midst of these things were found touching examples of fidelity to 
the earlier principles of brotherhood totally untouched by the corruption. 
At one time the scrubwomen in the downtown office buildings had a union of 
their own affiliated with the elevator men and the janitors. Although the 
union was used merely as a weapon in the fight of the coal teamsters 
against the use of natural gas in downtown buildings, it did not prevent 
the women from getting their first glimpse into the fellowship and the 
sense of protection which

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is the great gift of trades-unionism to the unskilled, unbefriended 
worker. I remember in a meeting held at Hull-House one Sunday afternoon, 
that the president of a "local" of scrubwomen stood up to relate her 
experience.  She told first of the long years in which the fear of losing 
her job and the fluctuating pay were harder to bear than the hard work 
itself, when she had regarded all the other women who scrubbed in the same 
building merely as rivals and was most afraid of the most miserable, 
because they offered to work for less and less as they were pressed harder 
and harder by debt. Then she told of the change that had come when the 
elevator men and even the lordly janitors had talked to her about an 
organization and had said that they must all stand together. She told how 
gradually she came to feel sure of her job and of her regular pay, and she 
was even starting to buy a house now that she could "calculate" how much 
she "could have for sure." Neither she nor any of the other members knew 
that the same combination which had organized the scrubwomen into a union 
later destroyed it during a strike inaugurated for their own purposes.

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That a Settlement is drawn into the labor issues of its city can seem 
remote to its purpose only to those who fail to realize that so far as the 
present industrial system thwarts our ethical demands, not only for social 
righteousness but for social order, a Settlement is committed to an effort 
to understand and, as far as possible, to alleviate it. That in this 
effort it should be drawn into fellowship with the local efforts of trades-
unions is most obvious. This identity of aim apparently commits the 
Settlement in the public mind to all the faiths and works of actual trades-
unions. Fellowship has so long implied similarity of creed that the fact 
that the Settlement often differs widely from the policy pursued by trades-
unionists and clearly expresses that difference does not in the least 
change public opinion in regard to its identification. This is especially 
true in periods of industrial disturbance, although it is exactly at such 
moments that the trades-unionists themselves are suspicious of all but 
their "own kind." It is during the much longer periods between strikes 
that the Settlement's fellowship with trades-unions is most satisfactory 
in the agitation for labor legislation and similar undertakings. The first 
officers of the Chicago Woman's Trades Union League were residents of 
Settlements, although they can claim little share in the later record the 
League made in securing the passage of the Illinois Ten-Hour Law for Women 
and in its many other fine undertakings.

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Nevertheless the reaction of strikes upon Chicago Settlements affords an 
interesting study in social psychology. For whether Hull-House is in any 
wise identified with the strike or not, makes no difference. When "Labor" 
is in disgrace we are always regarded as belonging to it and share the 
opprobrium. In the public excitement following the Pullman strike Hull-
House lost many friends; later the teamsters' strike caused another such 
defection, although my office in both cases had been solely that of a duly 
appointed arbitrator. 

There is, however, a certain comfort in the assumption I have often 
encountered that wherever one's judgment might place the justice of a 
given situation, it is understood that one's sympathy is not alienated by 
wrongdoing, and that through this sympathy one is still subject to 
vicarious suffering. I recall an incident during a turbulent Chicago 
strike which brought me much comfort. On the morning of the day of a 
luncheon to which I had accepted an invitation, the waitress, whom I did 
not know, said to my prospective hostess that she was sure I could not 
come. Upon being asked for her reason she replied that she had seen in the 
morning paper that the strikers had killed a "scab" and she was sure that 
I would feel quite too badly about such a thing to be able to keep a 
social engagement. In spite of the confused issues, she evidently realized 
my despair over the violence in a strike quite as definitely as if she had 
been told about it. Per-

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haps that sort of suffering and the attempt to interpret opposing forces 
to each other will long remain a function of the Settlement, 
unsatisfactory and difficult as the role often becomes. 

There has gradually developed between the various Settlements of Chicago a 
warm fellowship founded upon a like-mindedness resulting from similar 
experiences, quite as identity of interest and endeavor develop an 
enduring relation between the residents of the same Settlement. This sense 
of comradeship is never stronger than during the hardships and 
perplexities of a strike of unskilled workers revolting against the 
conditions which drag them even below the level of their European life. At 
such time the residents in various Settlements are driven to a standard of 
life argument running somewhat in this wise­that as the very existence of 
the State depends upon the character of its citizens, therefore if certain 
industrial conditions are forcing the workers below the standard of 
decency, it becomes possible to deduce the right of State regulation. Even 
as late as the stockyard strike this line of argument was denounced as 
"socialism" although it has since been confirmed as wise statesmanship by 
a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States which was apparently 
secured through the masterly argument of the Brandeis brief in the Oregon 
ten-hour case. 

In such wise the residents of an industrial neighborhood gradually 
comprehend the close connection

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of their own difficulties with national and even international movements. 
The residents in the Chicago Settlements became pioneer members in the 
American branch of the International League for Labor Legislation, because 
their neighborhood experiences had made them only too conscious of the 
dire need for protective legislation. In such a league, with its ardent 
members in every industrial nation of Europe, with its encouraging reports 
of the abolition of all night work for women in six European nations, with 
its careful observations on the results of employer's liability 
legislation and protection of machinery, one becomes identified with a 
movement of world-wide significance and manifold manifestation. 



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CHAPTER XI
IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN

FROM our very first months at Hull-House we found it much easier to deal 
with the first generation of crowded city life than with the second or 
third, because it is more natural and cast in a simpler mold. The Italian 
and Bohemian peasants who live in Chicago still put on their bright 
holiday clothes on a Sunday and go to visit their cousins. They tramp 
along with at least a suggestion of having once walked over plowed fields 
and breathed country air. The second generation of city poor too often 
have no holiday clothes and consider their relations a "bad lot." I have 
heard a drunken man in a maudlin stage babble of his good country mother 
and imagine he was driving the cows home, and I knew that his little son 
who laughed loud at him would be drunk earlier in life and would have no 
pastoral interlude to his ravings. Hospitality still survives among 
foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest 
Americans. One thing seemed clear in regard to entertaining immigrants; to 
preserve and keep whatever of value their past life contained and to bring 
them in contact with a better type of

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Americans. For several years, every Saturday evening the entire families 
of our Italian neighbors were our guests. These evenings were very popular 
during our first winters at Hull-House. Many educated Italians helped us, 
and the house became known as a place where Italians were welcome and 
where national holidays were observed. They come to us with their petty 
lawsuits, sad relics of the vendetta, with their incorrigible boys, with 
their hospital cases, with their aspirations for American clothes, and 
with their needs for an interpreter. 

An editor of an Italian paper made a genuine connection between us and the 
Italian colony, not only with the Neapolitans and the Sicilians of the 
immediate neighborhood, but with the educated connazionali throughout the 
city, until he went south to start an agricultural colony in Alabama, in 
the establishment of which Hull-House heartily coöperated. 

Possibly the South Italians more than any other immigrants represent the 
pathetic stupidity of agricultural people crowded into city tenements, and 
we were much gratified when thirty peasant families were induced to move 
upon the land which they knew so well how to cultivate. The starting of 
this colony, however, was a very expensive affair in spite of the fact 
that the colonists purchased the land at two dollars an acre; they needed 
much more than raw land, and although it was possible to collect the small 
sums necessary to sustain them

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during the hard time of the first two years, we were fully convinced that 
undertakings of this sort could be conducted properly only by colonization 
societies such as England has established, or, better still, by enlarging 
the functions of the Federal Department of Immigration. 

An evening similar in purpose to the one devoted to the Italians was 
organized for the Germans, in our first year. Owing to the superior 
education of our Teutonic guests and the clever leading of a cultivated 
German woman, these evenings reflected something of that cozy social 
intercourse which is found in its perfection in the fatherland. Our guests 
sang a great deal in the tender minor of the German folksong or in the 
rousing spirit of the Rhine, and they slowly but persistently pursued a 
course in German history and literature, recovering something of that 
poetry and romance which they had long since resigned with other good 
things. We found strong family affection between them and their English-
speaking children, but their pleasures were not in common, and they seldom 
went out together. Perhaps the greatest value of the Settlement to them 
was in placing large and pleasant rooms with musical facilities at their 
disposal, and in reviving their almost forgotten enthusiams. I have seen 
sons and daughters stand in complete surprise as their mother's knitting 
needles softly beat time to the song she was singing, or her worn face 
turned rosy under the hand-clapping as

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she made an old-fashioned curtsy at the end of a German poem. It was easy 
to fancy a growing touch of respect in her children's manner to her, and a 
rising enthusiasm for German literature and reminiscence on the part of 
all the family, an effort to bring together the old life and the new, a 
respect for the older cultivation, and not quite so much assurance that 
the new was the best. 

This tendency upon the part of the older immigrants to lose the amenities 
of European life without sharing those of America has often been deplored 
by keen observers from the home countries. When Professor Masurek of 
Prague gave a course of lectures in the University of Chicago, he was much 
distressed over the materialism into which the Bohemians of Chicago had 
fallen. The early immigrants had been so stirred by the opportunity to own 
real estate, an appeal perhaps to the Slavic land hunger, and their 
energies had become so completely absorbed in money-making that all other 
interests had apparently dropped away. And yet I recall a very touching 
incident in connection with a lecture Professor Masurek gave at Hull-
House, in which he had appealed to his countrymen to arouse themselves 
from this tendency to fall below their home civilization and to forget the 
great enthusiasm which had united them into the Pan-Slavic Movement. A 
Bohemian widow who supported herself and her two children by scrubbing, 
hastily sent her youngest child to purchase, with

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the twenty-five cents which was to have supplied them with food the next 
day, a bunch of red roses which she presented to the lecturer in 
appreciation of his testimony to the reality of the things of the spirit. 

An overmastering desire to reveal the humbler immigrant parents to their 
own children lay at the base of what has come to be called the Hull-House 
Labor Museum.  This was first suggested to my mind one early spring day 
when I saw an old Italian woman, her distaff against her homesick face, 
patiently spinning a thread by the simple stick spindle so reminiscent of 
all southern Europe. I was walking down Polk Street, perturbed in spirit, 
because it seemed so difficult to come into genuine relations with the 
Italian women and because they themselves so often lost their hold upon 
their Americanized children. It seemed to me that Hull-House ought to be 
able to devise some educational enterprise which should build a bridge 
between European and American experiences in such wise as to give them 
both more meaning and

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a sense of relation. I meditated that perhaps the power to see life as a 
whole is more needed in the immigrant quarter of a large city than 
anywhere else, and that the lack of this power is the most fruitful source 
of misunderstanding between European immigrants and their children, as it 
is between them and their American neighbors; and why should that chasm 
between fathers and sons, yawning at the feet of each generation, be made 
so unnecessarily cruel and impassable to these bewildered immigrants? 
Suddenly I looked up and saw the old woman with her distaff, sitting in 
the sun on the steps of a tenement house. She might have served as a model 
for one of Michelangelo's Fates, but her face brightened as I passed and, 
holding up her spindle for me to see, she called out that when she had 
spun a little more yarn, she would knit a pair of stockings for her 
goddaughter. The occupation of the old woman gave me the clue that was 
needed. Could we not interest the young people working in the neighborhood 
factories in these older forms of industry, so that, through their own 
parents and grandparents, they would find a dramatic representation of the 
inherited resources of their daily occupation. If these young people could 
actually see that the complicated machinery of the factory had been 
evolved from simple tools, they might at least make a beginning toward 
that education which Dr. Dewey defines as "a continuing reconstruction of 
experience." They might

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also lay a foundation for reverence of the past which Goethe declares to 
be the basis of all sound progress. 

My exciting walk on Polk Street was followed by many talks with Dr. Dewey 
and with one of the teachers in his school who was a resident at Hull-
House. Within a month a room was fitted up to which we might invite those 
of our neighbors who were possessed of old crafts and who were eager to 
use them. 

We found in the immediate neighborhood at least four varieties of these 
most primitive methods of spinning and three distinct variations of the 
same spindle in connection with wheels. It was possible to put these seven 
into historic sequence and order and to connect the whole with the present 
method of factory spinning. The same thing was done for weaving, and on 
every Saturday evening a little exhibit was made of these various forms of 
labor in the textile industry. Within one room a Syrian woman, a Greek, an 
Italian, a Russian, and an Irishwoman enabled even the most casual 
observer to see that there is no break in orderly evolution if we look at 
history from the industrial standpoint; that industry develops similarly 
and peacefully year by year among the workers of each nation, heedless of 
differences in language, religion, and political experiences. 

And then we grew ambitious and arranged lectures upon industrial history. 
I remember that

Page 238

after an interesting lecture upon the industrial revolution in England and 
a portrayal of the appalling conditions throughout the weaving districts 
of the north, which resulted from the hasty gathering of the weavers into 
the new towns, a

Page 239

Russian tailor in the audience was moved to make a speech. He suggested 
that whereas time had done much to alleviate the first difficulties in the 
transition of weaving from hand work to steam power, that in the 
application of steam to sewing we are still in our first stages, 
illustrated by the isolated woman who tries to support herself by hand 
needle- 

Page 240

work at home until driven out by starvation, as many of the hand weavers 
had been. 

The historical analogy seemed to bring a certain comfort to the tailor, as 
did a chart upon the wall showing the infinitesimal amount of time that 
steam had been applied to manufacturing processes compared to the 
centuries of hand labor. Human progress is slow and perhaps never more 
cruel than in the advance of industry, but is not the worker comforted by 
knowing that other historical periods have existed similar to the one in 
which he finds himself, and that the readjustment may be shortened and 
alleviated by judicious action; and is he not entitled to the solace which 
an artistic portrayal of the situation might give him? I remember the 
evening of the tailor's speech that I felt reproached because no poet or 
artist has endeared the sweaters' victim to us as George Eliot has made us 
love the belated weaver, Silas Marner. The textile museum is connected 
directly with the basket weaving, sewing, millinery, embroidery, and 
dressmaking constantly being taught at Hull-House, and so far as possible 
with the other educational departments; we have also been able to make a 
collection of products, of early implements, and of photographs which are 
full of suggestion. Yet far beyond its direct educational value, we prize 
it because it so often puts the immigrants into the position of teachers, 
and we imagine that it affords them a pleasant change from the tutelage in 
which all Americans,

Page 241

including their own children, are so apt to hold them. I recall a number 
of Russian women working in a sewing room near Hull-House, who heard one 
Christmas week that the House was going to give a party to which they 
might come. They arrived one afternoon, when, unfortunately, there was no 
party on hand and, although the residents did their best to entertain them 
with impromptu music and refreshments, it was quite evident that they were 
greatly disappointed. Finally it was suggested that they be shown the 
Labor Museum­where gradually the thirty sodden, tired women were 
transformed. They knew how to use the spindles and were delighted to find 
the Russian spinning frame. Many of them had never seen the

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spinning wheel, which has not penetrated to certain parts of Russia, and 
they regarded it as a new and wonderful invention. They turned up their 
dresses to show their homespun petticoats; they tried the looms; they 
explained the difficulty of the old patterns; in short, from having been 
stupidly entertained, they themselves did the entertaining. Because of a 
direct appeal to former experiences, the immigrant visitors were able for 
the moment to instruct their American hostesses in an old and honored 
craft, as was indeed becoming to their age and experience. 
In some such ways as these have the Labor Museum and the shops pointed out 
the possibilities which Hull-House has scarcely begun to develop, of 
demonstrating that culture is an understanding of the long-established 
occupations and thoughts of men, of the arts with which they have solaced 
their toil. A yearning to recover for the household arts something of 
their early sanctity and meaning arose strongly within me one evening when 
I was attending a Passover Feast to which I had been invited by a Jewish 
family in the neighborhood, where the traditional and religious 
significance of the woman's daily activity was still retained. The kosher 
food the Jewish mother spread before her family had been prepared 
according to traditional knowledge and with constant care in the use of 
utensils; upon her had fallen the responsibility to make all ready 
according to Mosaic instructions

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that the great crisis in a religious history might be fittingly set forth 
by her husband and son. Aside from the grave religious significance in the 
ceremony, my mind was filled with shifting pictures of woman's labor with 
which travel makes one familiar; the Indian women grinding grain outside 
of their huts as they sing praises to the sun and rain; a file of white-
clad Moorish women whom I had once seen waiting their turn at a well in 
Tangiers; south Italian women kneeling in a row along the stream and 
beating their wet clothes against the smooth white stones; the milking, 
the gardening, the marketing in thousands of hamlets, which are such 
direct expressions of the solicitude and affection at the basis of all 
family life. 

There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm 
of woman's primitive activities. I recall a certain Italian girl who came 
every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which 
her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left 
her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door 
because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the 
rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over 
her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, 
Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School 
of Education who much admired the spinning, and she concluded from their

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conversation that her mother was "the best stick-spindle spinner in 
America." When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction, I 
took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had 
lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the opportunity she 
and the other women of the village had to drop their spindles over the 
edge of a precipice, they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of 
the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of 
that life­how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, 
and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store 
hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, 
and that while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways, she 
also had a right to expect her daughter to know something of the old ways. 

That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own mind 
persistently dwelt, was that her mother's whole life had been spent in a 
secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized 
observances, until her very religion clung to local sanctities­to the 
shrine before which she had always prayed, to the pavement and walls of 
the low vaulted church­and then suddenly she was torn from it all and 
literally put out to sea, straight away from the solid habits of her 
religious and domestic life, and she now walked

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timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore. 

It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other 
background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two 
things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under 
the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden 
away as uncouth; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same 
door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which 
had been so much admired. 

A club of necktie workers formerly meeting at Hull-House persistently 
resented any attempt on the part of their director to improve their minds. 
The president once said that she "wouldn't be caught dead at a lecture," 
that she came to the club "to get some fun out of it," and indeed it was 
most natural that she should crave recreation after a hard day's work. One 
evening I saw the entire club listening to quite a stiff lecture in the 
Labor Museum and to my rather wicked remark to the president that I was 
surprised to see her enjoying a lecture, she replied that she did not call 
this a lecture, she called this "getting next to the stuff you work with 
all the time." It was perhaps the sincerest tribute we have ever received 
as to the success of the undertaking. 

The Labor Museum continually demanded more space as it was enriched by a 
fine textile exhibit

Page 246

lent by the Field Museum, and later by carefully selected specimens of 
basketry from the Philippines. The shops have finally included a group of 
three or four women, Irish, Italian, Danish, who have become a permanent 
working force in the textile department which has developed into a self-
supporting industry through the sale of its homespun products. 

These women and a few men, who come to the museum to utilize their 
European skill in pottery, metal, and wood, demonstrate that immigrant 
colonies might yield to our American life something very valuable, if 
their resources were intelligently studied and developed. I recall an 
Italian, who had decorated the doorposts of his tenement with a beautiful 
pattern he had previously used in carving the reredos of a Neapolitan 
church, who was "fired" by his landlord on the ground of destroying 
property. His feelings were hurt, not so much that he had been put out of 
his house, as that his work had been so disregarded; and he said that when 
people traveled in Italy they liked to look at wood carvings but that in 
America "they only made money out of you." 

Sometimes the suppression of the instinct of workmanship is followed by 
more disastrous results. A Bohemian whose little girl attended classes at 
Hull-House, in one of his periodic drunken spells had literally almost 
choked her to death, and later had committed suicide when in delirium 
tremens.

Page 247

His poor wife, who stayed a week at Hull-House after the disaster until a 
new tenement could be arranged for her, one day showed me a gold ring 
which her husband had made for their betrothal. It exhibited the most 
exquisite workmanship, and she said that although in the old country he 
had been a goldsmith, in America he had for twenty years shoveled coal in 
a furnace room of a large manufacturing plant; that whenever she saw one 
of his "restless fits," which preceded his drunken periods, "coming on," 
if she could provide him with a bit of metal and persuade him to stay at 
home and work at it, he was all right and the time passed without 
disaster, but that "nothing else would do it." This story threw a flood of 
light upon the dead man's struggle and on the stupid maladjustment which 
had broken him down. Why had we never been told? Why had our interest in 
the remarkable musical ability of his child blinded us to the hidden 
artistic ability of the father? We had forgotten that a long-established 
occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art 
with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his 
uncertain temperament. 

There are many examples of touching fidelity to immigrant parents on the 
part of their grown children; a young man who day after day attends 
ceremonies which no longer express his religious convictions and who makes 
his vain effort

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to interest his Russian Jewish father in social problems; a daughter who 
might earn much more money as a stenographer could she work from Monday 
morning till Saturday night, but who quietly and docilely makes neckties 
for low wages because she can thus abstain from work Saturdays to please 
her father; these young people, like poor Maggie Tulliver, through many 
painful experiences have reached the conclusion that pity, memory, and 
faithfulness are natural ties with paramount claims. 

This faithfulness, however, is sometimes ruthlessly imposed upon by 
immigrant parents who, eager for money and accustomed to the patriarchal 
authority of peasant households, hold their children in a stern bondage 
which requires a surrender of all their wages and concedes no time or 
money for pleasures. 

There are many convincing illustrations that this parental harshness often 
results in juvenile delinquency. A Polish boy of seventeen came to Hull-
House one day to ask a contribution of fifty cents "towards a flower piece 
for the funeral of an old Hull-House club boy." A few questions made it 
clear that the object was fictitious, whereupon the boy broke down and 
half-defiantly stated that he wanted to buy two twenty-five cent tickets, 
one for his girl and one for himself, to a dance of the Benevolent Social 
Twos; that he hadn't a penny of his own although he had worked in a brass 
foundry

Page 249

for three years and had been advanced twice, because he always had to give 
his pay envelope unopened to his father; "just look at the clothes he buys 
me" was his concluding remark. 

Perhaps the girls are held even more rigidly. In a recent investigation of 
two hundred working girls it was found that only five per cent had the use 
of their own money and that sixty-two per cent turned in all they earned, 
literally every penny, to their mothers. It was through this little 
investigation that we first knew Marcella, a pretty young German girl who 
helped her widowed mother year after year to care for a large family of 
younger children. She was content for the most part although her mother's 
old-country notions of dress gave her but an infinitesimal amount of her 
own wages to spend on her clothes, and she was quite sophisticated as to 
proper dressing because she sold silk in a neighborhood department store. 
Her mother approved of the young man who was showing her various 
attentions and agreed that Marcella should accept his invitation to a 
ball, but would allow her not a penny toward a new gown to replace one 
impossibly plain and shabby. Marcella spent a sleepless night and wept 
bitterly, although she well knew that the doctor's bill for the children's 
scarlet fever was not yet paid. The next day as she was cutting off three 
yards of shining pink silk, the thought came to her that it would make her 
a fine new waist to wear to the ball. She wistfully saw

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it wrapped in paper and carelessly stuffed into the muff of the purchaser, 
when suddenly the parcel fell upon the floor. No one was looking and quick 
as a flash the girl picked it up and pushed it into her blouse. The theft 
was discovered by the relentless department store detective who, for "the 
sake of example," insisted upon taking the case into court. The poor 
mother wept bitter tears over this downfall of her "frommes Mädchen" and 
no one had the heart to tell her of her own blindness. 

I know a Polish boy whose earnings were all given to his father who 
gruffly refused all requests for pocket money. One Christmas his little 
sisters, having been told by their mother that they were too poor to have 
any Christmas presents, appealed to the big brother as to one who was 
earning money of his own. Flattered by the implication, but at the same 
time quite impecunious, the night before Christmas he nonchalantly walked 
through a neighboring department store and stole a manicure set for one 
little sister and a string of beads for the other. He was caught at the 
door by the house detective as one of those children whom each local 
department store arrests in the weeks before Christmas at the daily rate 
of eight to twenty. The youngest of these offenders are seldom taken into 
court but are either sent home with a warning or turned over to the 
officers of the Juvenile Protective Association. Most of these premature 
law breakers are in search of Americanized clothing and others

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are only looking for playthings. They are all distracted by the profusion 
and variety of the display, and their moral sense is confused by the 
general air of openhandedness. 

These disastrous efforts are not unlike those of many younger children who 
are constantly arrested for petty thieving because they are too eager to 
take home food or fuel which will relieve the distress and need they so 
constantly hear discussed. The coal on the wagons, the vegetables 
displayed in front of the grocery shops, the very wooden blocks in the 
loosened street paving are a challenge to their powers to help out at 
home. A Bohemian boy who was out on parole from the old detention home of 
the Juvenile Court itself, brought back five stolen chickens to the matron 
for Sunday dinner, saying that he knew the Committee were "having a hard 
time to fill up so many kids and perhaps these fowl would help out." The 
honest immigrant parents, totally ignorant of American laws and municipal 
regulations, often send a child to pick up coal on the railroad tracks or 
to stand at three o'clock in the morning before the side door of a 
restaurant which gives away broken food, or to collect grain for the 
chickens at the base of elevators and standing cars. The latter custom 
accounts for the large number of boys arrested for breaking the seals on 
grain freight cars. It is easy for a child thus trained to accept the 
proposition of a junk dealer to bring him bars of iron stored in

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freight yards. Four boys quite recently had thus carried away and sold to 
one man two tons of iron. 

Four fifths of the children brought into the Juvenile Court in Chicago are 
the children of foreigners. The Germans are the greatest offenders, Polish 
next. Do their children suffer from the excess of virtue in those parents 
so eager to own a house and lot? One often sees a grasping parent in the 
court, utterly broken down when the Americanized youth who has been 
brought to grief clings as piteously to his peasant father as if he were 
still a frightened little boy in the steerage. 

Many of these children have come to grief through their premature fling 
into city life, having thrown off parental control as they have 
impatiently discarded foreign ways. Boys of ten and twelve will refuse to 
sleep at home, preferring the freedom of an old brewery vault or an empty 
warehouse to the obedience required by their parents, and for days these 
boys will live on the milk and bread which they steal from the back 
porches after the early morning delivery. Such children complain that 
there is "no fun" at home. One little chap who was given a vacant lot to 
cultivate by the City Garden Association insisted upon raising only 
popcorn and tried to present the entire crop to Hull-House "to be used for 
the parties," with the stipulation that he would have "to be invited every 
single time." Then there are little groups of

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dissipated young men who pride themselves upon their ability to live 
without working and who despise all the honest and sober ways of their 
immigrant parents. They are at once a menace and a center of 
demoralization. Certainly the bewildered parents, unable to speak English 
and ignorant of the city, whose children have disappeared for days or 
weeks, have often come to Hull-House, evincing that agony which fairly 
separates the marrow from the bone, as if they had discovered a new type 
of suffering, devoid of the healing in familiar sorrows. It is as if they 
did not know how to search for the children without the assistance of the 
children themselves. Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of such cases is 
their revelation of the premature dependence of the older and wiser upon 
the young and foolish, which is in itself often responsible for the 
situation because it has given the children an undue sense of their own 
importance and a false security that they can take care of themselves. 

On the other hand, an Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking at the 
public school will help her mother to connect the entire family with 
American food and household habits. That the mother has never baked bread 
in Italy­only mixed it in her own house and then taken it out to the 
village oven­makes all the more valuable her daughter's understanding of 
the complicated cooking stove. The same thing is true of the girl who 
learns to sew

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in the public school, and more than anything else, perhaps, of the girl 
who receives the first simple instruction in the care of little 
children­that skillful care which every tenement-house baby requires if he 
is to be pulled through his second summer. As a result of this teaching I 
recall a young girl who carefully explained to her Italian mother that the 
reason the babies in Italy were so healthy and the babies in Chicago were 
so sickly, was not, as her mother had firmly insisted, because her babies 
in Italy had goat's milk and her babies in America had cow's milk, but 
because the milk in Italy was clean and the milk in Chicago was dirty. She 
said that when you milked your own goat before the door, you knew that the 
milk was clean, but when you bought milk from the grocery store after it 
had been carried for many miles in the country, you couldn't tell whether 
it was fit for the baby to drink until the men from the City Hall who had 
watched it all the way said that it was all right. 

Thus through civic instruction in the public schools, the Italian woman 
slowly became urbanized in the sense in which the word was used by her own 
Latin ancestors, and thus the habits of her entire family were modified. 
The public schools in the immigrant colonies deserve all the praise as 
Americanizing agencies which can be bestowed upon them, and there is 
little doubt that the fast-changing curriculum in the direction of the 
vaca-

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tion-school experiments will react more directly upon such households. 

It is difficult to write of the relation of the older and most foreign-
looking immigrants to the children of other people­the Italians whose 
fruit-carts are upset simply because they are "dagoes," or the Russian 
peddlers who are stoned and sometimes badly injured because it has become 
a code of honor in a gang of boys to thus express their derision. The 
members of a Protective Association of Jewish Peddlers organized at Hull-
House related daily experiences in which old age had been treated with 
such irreverence, cherished dignity with such disrespect, that a listener 
caught the passion of Lear in the old texts, as a platitude enunciated by 
a man who discovers in it his own experience thrills us as no unfamiliar 
phrases can possibly do. The Greeks are filled with amazed rage when their 
very name is flung at them as an opprobrious epithet. Doubtless these 
difficulties would be much minimized in America, if we faced our own race 
problem with courage and intelligence, and these very Mediterranean 
immigrants might give us valuable help. Certainly they are less conscious 
than the Anglo-Saxon of color distinctions, perhaps because of their 
traditional familiarity with Carthage and Egypt. They listened with 
respect and enthusiasm to a scholarly address delivered by Professor Du 
Bois at Hull-House on a Lincoln's birthday, with apparently no 
consciousness of that

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race difference which color seems to accentuate so absurdly, and upon my 
return from various conferences held in the interest of "the advancement 
of colored people," I have had many illuminating conversations with my 
cosmopolitan neighbors. 

The celebration of national events has always been a source of new 
understanding and companionship with the members of the contiguous foreign 
colonies not only between them and their American neighbors but between 
them and their own children. One of our earliest Italian events was a 
rousing commemoration of Garibaldi's birthday, and his imposing bust, 
presented to Hull-House that evening, was long the chief ornament of our 
front hall. It called forth great enthusiasm from the connazionali whom 
Ruskin calls, not the "common people" of Italy, but the "companion people" 
because of their power for swift sympathy. 

A huge Hellenic meeting held at Hull-House, in which the achievements of 
the classic period were set forth both in Greek and English by scholars of 
well-known repute, brought us into a new sense of fellowship with all our 
Greek neighbors. As the mayor of Chicago was seated upon the right hand of 
the dignified senior priest of the Greek Church and they were greeted 
alternately in the national hymns of America and Greece, one felt a 
curious sense of the possibility of transplanting to new and crude Chicago 
some of the traditions of Athens

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itself, so deeply cherished in the hearts of this group of citizens. 

The Greeks indeed gravely consider their traditions as their most precious 
possession and more than once in meetings of protest held by the Greek 
colony against the aggressions of the Bulgarians in Macedonia, I have 
heard it urged that the Bulgarians are trying to establish a protectorate, 
not only for their immediate advantage, but that they may claim a glorious 
history for the "barbarous country." It is said that on the basis of this 
protectorate, they are already teaching in their schools that Alexander 
the Great was a Bulgarian and that it will be but a short time before they 
claim Aristotle himself, an indignity the Greeks will never suffer! 

To me personally the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Mazzini's 
birth was a matter of great interest. Throughout the world that day 
Italians who believed in a United Italy came together. They recalled the 
hopes of this man who, with all his devotion to his country was still more 
devoted to humanity and who dedicated to the workingmen of Italy, an 
appeal so philosophical, so filled with a yearning for righteousness, that 
it transcended all national boundaries and became a bugle call for "The 
Duties of Man." A copy of this document was given to every school child in 
the public schools of Italy on this one hundredth anniversary, and as the 
Chicago branch of the

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Society of Young Italy marched into our largest hall and presented to Hull-
House an heroic bust of Mazzini, I found myself devoutly hoping that the 
Italian youth, who have committed their future to America, might indeed 
become "the Apostles of the fraternity of nations" and that our American 
citizenship might be built without disturbing these foundations which were 
laid of old time. 

[image caption: CHICAGO RIVER AT HALSTEAD STREET.]