Twenty Years at Hull-House - Chapters XII-XIV



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CHAPTER XII
TOLSTOYISM

THE administration of charity in Chicago during the winter following the 
World's Fair had been of necessity most difficult, for, although large 
sums had been given to the temporary relief organization which endeavored 
to care for the thousands of destitute strangers stranded in the city, we 
all worked under a sense of desperate need and a paralyzing consciousness 
that our best efforts were most inadequate to the situation. 

During the many relief visits I paid that winter in tenement houses and 
miserable lodgings, I was constantly shadowed by a certain sense of shame 
that I should be comfortable in the midst of such distress. This resulted 
at times in a curious reaction against all the educational and 
philanthropic activities in which I had been engaged. In the face of the 
desperate hunger and need, these could not but seem futile and 
superficial. The hard winter in Chicago had turned the thoughts of many of 
us to these stern matters. A young friend of mine who came daily to Hull-
House consulted me in regard to going into the paper warehouse belonging 
to her father that she might there sort rags with the

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Polish girls; another young girl took a place in a sweatshop for a month, 
doing her work so simply and thoroughly that the proprietor had no notion 
that she had not been driven there by need; still two others worked in a 
shoe factory;­and all this happened before such adventures were undertaken 
in order to procure literary material. It was in the following winter that 
the pioneer effort in this direction, Walter Wyckoff's account of his vain 
attempt to find work in Chicago, compelled even the sternest businessman 
to drop his assertion that "any man can find work if he wants it." 

The dealing directly with the simplest human wants may have been 
responsible for an impression which I carried about with me almost 
constantly for a period of two years and which culminated finally in a 
visit to Tolstoy­that the Settlement, or Hull-House at least, was a mere 
pretense and travesty of the simple impulse "to live with the poor," so 
long as the residents did not share the common lot of hard labor and scant 
fare. 

Actual experience had left me in much the same state of mind I had been in 
after reading Tolstoy's "What to Do," which is a description of his futile 
efforts to relieve the unspeakable distress and want in the Moscow winter 
of 1881, and his inevitable conviction that only he who literally shares 
his own shelter and food with the needy can claim to have served them.

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Doubtless it is much easier to see "what to do" in rural Russia, where all 
the conditions tend to make the contrast as broad as possible between 
peasant labor and noble idleness, than it is to see "what to do" in the 
interdependencies of the modern industrial city. But for that very reason 
perhaps, Tolstoy's clear statement is valuable for that type of 
conscientious person in every land who finds it hard, not only to walk in 
the path of righteousness, but to discover where the path lies. 

I had read the books of Tolstoy steadily all the years since "My Religion" 
had come into my hands immediately after I left college. The reading of 
that book had made clear that men's poor little efforts to do right are 
put forth for the most part in the chill of self-distrust; I became 
convinced that if the new social order ever came, it would come by 
gathering to itself all the pathetic human endeavor which had indicated 
the forward direction. But I was most eager to know whether Tolstoy's 
undertaking to do his daily share of the physical labor of the world, that 
labor which is "so disproportionate to the unnourished strength" of those 
by whom it is ordinarily performed, had brought him peace! 

I had time to review carefully many things in my mind during the long days 
of convalescence following an illness of typhoid fever which I suffered in 
the autumn of 1895. The illness was so prolonged

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that my health was most unsatisfactory during the following winter, and 
the next May I went abroad with my friend, Miss Smith, to effect if 
possible a more complete recovery. 

The prospect of seeing Tolstoy filled me with the hope of finding a clue 
to the tangled affairs of city poverty. I was but one of thousands of our 
contemporaries who were turning toward this Russian, not as to a seer­his 
message is much too confused and contradictory for that­but as to a man 
who has had the ability to lift his life to the level of his conscience, 
to translate his theories into action. 

Our first few weeks in England were most stimulating. A dozen years ago 
London still showed traces of "that exciting moment in the life of the 
nation when its youth is casting about for new enthusiasms," but it 
evinced still more of that British capacity to perform the hard work of 
careful research and self-examination which must precede any successful 
experiments in social reform. Of the varied groups and individuals whose 
suggestions remained with me for years, I recall perhaps as foremost those 
members of the new London County Council whose far-reaching plans for the 
betterment of London could not but enkindle enthusiasm. It was a most 
striking expression of that effort which would place beside the refinement 
and pleasure of the rich, a new refinement and a new pleasure born of the 
commonwealth

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and the common joy of all the citizens, that at this moment they prized 
the municipal pleasure boats upon the Thames no less than the extensive 
schemes for the municipal housing of the poorest people. Ben Tillet, who 
was then an alderman, "the docker sitting beside the duke," took me in a 
rowboat down the Thames on a journey made exciting by the hundreds of 
dockers who cheered him as we passed one wharf after another on our way to 
his home at Greenwich; John Burns showed us his wonderful civic 
accomplishments at Battersea, the plant turning street sweepings into 
cement pavements, the technical school teaching boys brick laying and 
plumbing, and the public bath in which the children of the Board School 
were receiving a swimming lesson­these measures anticipating our 
achievements in Chicago by at least a decade and a half. The new Education 
Bill which was destined to drag on for twelve years before it developed 
into the children's charter, was then a storm center in the House of 
Commons. Miss Smith and I were much pleased to be taken to tea on the 
Parliament terrace by its author, Sir John Gorst, although we were quite 
bewildered by the arguments we heard there for church schools versus 
secular. 

We heard Keir Hardie before a large audience of workingmen standing in the 
open square of Canning Town outline the great things to be accomplished by 
the then new Labor Party, and we

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joined the vast body of men in the booming hymn 

When wilt Thou save the people,
O God of Mercy, when! 
finding it hard to realize that we were attending a political meeting. It 
seemed that moment as if the hopes of democracy were more likely to come 
to pass on English soil than upon our own. Robert Blatchford's stirring 
pamphlets were in everyone's hands, and a reception given by Karl Marx's 
daughter, Mrs. Aveling, to Liebknecht before he returned to Germany to 
serve a prison term for his lèse majesté speech in the Reichstag, gave us 
a glimpse of the old-fashioned orthodox Socialist who had not yet begun to 
yield to the biting ridicule of Bernard Shaw although he flamed in their 
midst that evening. 

Octavia Hill kindly demonstrated to us the principles upon which her well-
founded business of rent collecting was established, and with pardonable 
pride showed us the Red Cross Square with its cottages marvelously 
picturesque and comfortable, on two sides, and on the third a public hall 
and common drawing room for the use of all the tenants; the interior of 
the latter had been decorated by pupils of Walter Crane with mural 
frescoes portraying the heroism in the life of the modern workingman. 

While all this was warmly human, we also had opportunities to see 
something of a group of men

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and women who were approaching the social problem from the study of 
economics; among others Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb who were at work on their 
Industrial Democracy; Mr. John Hobson who was lecturing on the evolution 
of modern capitalism. 

We followed factory inspectors on a round of duties performed with a 
thoroughness and a trained intelligence which were a revelation of the 
possibilities of public service. When it came to visiting Settlements, we 
were at least reassured that they were not falling into identical lines of 
effort. Canon Ingram, who has since become Bishop of London, was then 
warden of Oxford House and in the midst of an experiment which pleased me 
greatly, the more because it was carried on by a churchman. Oxford House 
had hired all the concert halls­vaudeville shows we later called them in 
Chicago­which were found in Bethnal Green, for every Saturday night. The 
residents had censored the programs, which they were careful to keep 
popular, and any workingman who attended a show in Bethnal Green on a 
Saturday night, and thousands of them did, heard a program the better for 
this effort. 

One evening in University Hall Mrs. Humphry Ward, who had just returned 
from Italy, described the effect of the Italian salt tax in a talk which 
was evidently one in a series of lectures upon the economic wrongs which 
pressed heaviest upon the poor;

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at Browning House, at the moment, they were giving prizes to those of 
their costermonger neighbors who could present the best cared-for donkeys, 
and the warden, Herbert Stead, exhibited almost the enthusiasm of his well-
known brother, for that crop of kindliness which can be garnered most 
easily from the acreage where human beings grow the thickest; at the 
Bermondsey Settlement they were rejoicing that their University Extension 
students had successfully passed the examinations for the University of 
London. The entire impression received in England of research, of 
scholarship, of organized public spirit, was in marked contrast to the 
impressions of my next visit in 1900, when the South African War had 
absorbed the enthusiasm of the nation and the wrongs at "the heart of the 
empire" were disregarded and neglected. 

London, of course, presented sharp differences to Russia where social 
conditions were written in black and white with little shading, like a 
demonstration of the Chinese proverb, "Where one man lives in luxury, 
another is dying of hunger." 

The fair of Nijni-Novgorod seemed to take us to the very edge of 
civilization so remote and eastern that the merchants brought their 
curious goods upon the backs of camels or on strange craft riding at 
anchor on the broad Volga. But even here our letter of introduction to 
Korolenko, the novelist, brought us to a realization of that strange 
mingling of a remote past and a self-conscious present which

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Russia presents on every hand. This same contrast was also shown by the 
pilgrims trudging on pious errands to monasteries, to tombs, and to the 
Holy Land itself, with their bleeding feet bound in rags and thrust into 
bast sandals, and, on the other hand, by the revolutionists even then 
advocating a Republic which should obtain not only in political but also 
in industrial affairs. 

We had letters of introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Aylmer Maude of Moscow, 
since well known as the translators of "Resurrection" and other of 
Tolstoy's later works, who at that moment were on the eve of leaving 
Russia in order to form an agricultural colony in South England where they 
might support themselves by the labor of their hands. We gladly accepted 
Mr. Maude's offer to take us to Yasnaya Polyana and to introduce us to 
Count Tolstoy, and never did a disciple journey toward his master with 
more enthusiasm than did our guide. When, however, Mr. Maude actually 
presented Miss Smith and myself to Count Tolstoy, knowing well his 
master's attitude toward philanthropy, he endeavored to make Hull-House 
appear much more noble and unique than I should have ventured to do. 

Tolstoy, standing by clad in his peasant garb, listened gravely but, 
glancing distrustfully at the sleeves of my traveling gown which 
unfortunately at that season were monstrous in size, he took hold of an 
edge and pulling out one sleeve to an inter-

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minable breadth, said quite simply that "there was enough stuff on one arm 
to make a frock for a little girl," and asked me directly if I did not 
find "such a dress" a "barrier to the people." I was too disconcerted to 
make a very clear explanation, although I tried to say that monstrous as 
my sleeves were they did not compare in size with those of the working 
girls in Chicago and that nothing would more effectively separate me from 
"the people" than a cotton blouse following the simple lines of the human 
form; even if I had wished to imitate him and "dress as a peasant," it 
would have been hard to choose which peasant among the thirty-six 
nationalities we had recently counted in our ward. Fortunately the 
countess came to my rescue with a recital of her former attempts to clothe 
hypothetical little girls in yards of material cut from a train and other 
superfluous parts of her best gown until she had been driven to a firm 
stand which she advised me to take at once. But neither Countess Tolstoy 
nor any other friend was on hand to help me out of my predicament later, 
when I was asked who "fed" me, and how did I obtain "shelter"? Upon my 
reply that a farm a hundred miles from Chicago supplied me with the 
necessities of life, I fairly anticipated the next scathing question: "So 
you are an absentee landlord? Do you think you will help the people more 
by adding yourself to the crowded city than you would by tilling your own 
soil?" This new sense of discomfort over a failure

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to till my own soil was increased when Tolstoy's second daughter appeared 
at the five-o'clock tea table set under the trees, coming straight from 
the harvest field where she had been working with a group of peasants 
since five o'clock in the morning, not pretending to work but really 
taking the place of a peasant woman who had hurt her foot. She was plainly 
much exhausted, but neither expected nor received sympathy from the 
members of a family who were quite accustomed to see each other carry out 
their convictions in spite of discomfort and fatigue. The martyrdom of 
discomfort, however, was obviously much easier to bear than that to which, 
even to the eyes of the casual visitor, Count Tolstoy daily subjected 
himself, for his study in the basement of the conventional dwelling, with 
its short shelf of battered books and its scythe and spade leaning against 
the wall, had many times lent itself to that ridicule which is the most 
difficult form of martyrdom. 

That summer evening as we sat in the garden with a group of visitors from 
Germany, from England and America, who had traveled to the remote Russian 
village that they might learn of this man, one could not forbear the 
constant inquiry to one's self, as to why he was so regarded as sage and 
saint that this party of people should be repeated each day of the year. 
It seemed to me then that we were all attracted by this sermon of the 
deed, because Tolstoy had made the one supreme per-

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sonal effort, one might almost say the one frantic personal effort, to put 
himself into right relations with the humblest people, with the men who 
tilled his soil, blacked his boots, and cleaned his stables. Doubtless the 
heaviest burden of our contemporaries is a consciousness of a divergence 
between our democratic theory on the one hand, that working people have a 
right to the intellectual resources of society, and the actual fact on the 
other hand, that thousands of them are so overburdened with toil that 
there is no leisure nor energy left for the cultivation of the mind. We 
constantly suffer from the strain and indecision of believing this theory 
and acting as if we did not believe it, and this man who years before had 
tried "to get off the backs of the peasants," who had at least simplified 
his life and worked with his hands, had come to be a prototype to many of 
his generation. 

Doubtless all of the visitors sitting in the Tolstoy garden that evening 
had excused themselves from laboring with their hands upon the theory that 
they were doing something more valuable for society in other ways. No one 
among our contemporaries has dissented from this point of view so 
violently as Tolstoy himself, and yet no man might so easily have excused 
himself from hard and rough work on the basis of his genius and of his 
intellectual contributions to the world. So far, however, from considering 
his time too valuable

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to be spent in labor in the field or in making shoes, our great host was 
too eager to know life to be willing to give up this companionship of 
mutual labor. One instinctively found reasons why it was easier for a 
Russian than for the rest of us to reach this conclusion; the Russian 
peasants have a proverb which says: "Labor is the house that love lives
in," by which they mean that no two people nor group of people can come 
into affectionate relations with each other unless they carry on together 
a mutual task, and when the Russian peasant talks of labor he means labor 
on the soil, or, to use the phrase of the great peasant, Bondereff, "bread 
labor." Those monastic orders founded upon agricultural labor, those 
philosophical experiments like Brook Farm and many another have attempted 
to reduce to action this same truth. Tolstoy himself has written many 
times his own con-

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victions and attempts in this direction, perhaps never more tellingly than 
in the description of Lavin's morning spent in the harvest field, when he 
lost his sense of grievance and isolation and felt a strange new 
brotherhood for the peasants, in proportion as the rhythmic motion of his 
scythe became one with theirs. 

At the long dinner table laid in the garden were the various traveling 
guests, the grown-up daughters, and the younger children with their 
governess. The countess presided over the usual European dinner served by 
men, but the count and the daughter, who had worked all day in the fields, 
ate only porridge and black bread and drank only kvas, the fare of the hay-
making peasants. Of course we are all accustomed to the fact that those 
who perform the heaviest labor eat the coarsest and simplest fare at the 
end of the day, but it is not often that we sit at the same table with 
them while we ourselves eat the more elaborate food prepared by someone 
else's labor. Tolstoy ate his simple supper without remark or comment upon 
the food his family and guests preferred to eat, assuming that they, as 
well as he, had settled the matter with their own consciences. 

The Tolstoy household that evening was much interested in the fate of a 
young Russian spy who had recently come to Tolstoy in the guise of a 
country schoolmaster, in order to obtain a copy of "Life," which had been 
interdicted by the censor

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of the press. After spending the night in talk with Tolstoy, the spy had 
gone away with a copy of the forbidden manuscript but, unfortunately for 
himself, having become converted to Tolstoy's views he had later made a 
full confession to the authorities and had been exiled to Siberia. 
Tolstoy, holding that it was most unjust to exile the disciple while he, 
the author of the book, remained at large, had pointed out this 
inconsistency in an open letter to one of the Moscow newspapers. The 
discussion of this incident, of course, opened up the entire subject of 
nonresidence, and curiously enough I was disappointed in Tolstoy's 
position in the matter. It seemed to me that he made too great a 
distinction between the use of physical force and that moral energy which 
can override another's differences and scruples with equal ruthlessness. 

With that inner sense of mortification with which one finds one's self at 
difference with the great authority, I recalled the conviction of the 
early Hull-House residents; that whatever of good the Settlement had to 
offer should be put into positive terms, that we might live with 
opposition to no man, with recognition of the good in every man, even the 
most wretched. We had often departed from this principle, but had it not 
in every case been a confession of weakness, and had we not always found 
antagonism a foolish and unwarrantable expenditure of energy?

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The conversation at dinner and afterward, although conducted with 
animation and sincerity, for the moment stirred vague misgivings within 
me. Was Tolstoy more logical than life warrants? Could the wrongs of life 
be reduced to the terms of unrequited labor and all be made right if each 
person performed the amount necessary to satisfy his own wants? Was it not 
always easy to put up a strong case if one took the naturalistic view of 
life? But what about the historic view, the inevitable shadings and 
modifications which life itself brings to its own interpretation? Miss 
Smith and I took a night train back to Moscow in that tumult of feeling 
which is always produced by contact with a conscience making one more of 
those determined efforts to probe to the very foundations of the 
mysterious world in which we find ourselves. A horde of perplexing 
questions, concerning those problems of existence of which in happier 
moments we catch but fleeting glimpses and at which we even then stand 
aghast, pursued us relentlessly on the long journey through the great 
wheat plains of South Russia, through the crowded Ghetto of Warsaw, and 
finally into the smiling fields of Germany where the peasant men and women 
were harvesting the grain. I remember that through the sight of those 
toiling peasants, I made a curious connection between the bread labor 
advocated by Tolstoy and the comfort the harvest fields are said to have 
once brought to

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Luther when, much perturbed by many theological difficulties, he suddenly 
forgot them all in a gush of gratitude for mere bread, exclaiming,  "How 
it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fine tapered stem; the meek 
earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again!" At least the 
toiling poor had this comfort of bread labor, and perhaps it did not 
matter that they gained it unknowingly and painfully, if only they walked 
in the path of labor. In the exercise of that curious power possessed by 
the theorist to inhibit all experiences which do not enhance his doctrine, 
I did not permit myself to recall that which I knew so well­that exigent 
and unremitting labor grants the poor no leisure even in the supreme 
moments of human suffering and that "all griefs are lighter with bread." 

I may have wished to secure this solace for myself at the cost of the 
least possible expenditure of time and energy, for during the next month 
in Germany, when I read everything of Tolstoy's that had been translated 
into English, German, or French, there grew up in my mind a conviction

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that what I ought to do upon my return to Hull-House was to spend at least 
two hours every morning in the little bakery which we had recently added 
to the equipment of our coffeehouse. Two hours' work would be but a 
wretched compromise, but it was hard to see how I could take more time out 
of each day. I had been taught to bake bread in my childhood not only as a 
household accomplishment, but because my father, true to his miller's 
tradition, had insisted that each one of his daughters on her twelfth 
birthday must present him with a satisfactory wheat loaf of her own 
baking, and he was most exigent as to the quality of this test loaf. What 
could be more in keeping with my training and tradition than baking bread? 
I did not quite see how my activity would fit in with that of the German 
union baker who presided over the Hull-House bakery, but all such matters 
were secondary and certainly could be arranged. It may be that I had thus 
to pacify my aroused conscience before I could settle down to hear 
Wagner's "Ring" at Beyreuth; it may be that I had fallen a victim to the 
phrase, "bread labor"; but at any rate I held fast to the belief that I 
should do this, through the entire journey homeward, on land and sea, 
until I actually arrived in Chicago when suddenly the whole scheme seemed 
to me as utterly preposterous as it doubtless was. The half dozen people 
invariably waiting to see me after breakfast, the piles of letters to be 
opened and answered, the

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demand of actual and pressing wants­were these all to be pushed aside and 
asked to wait while I saved my soul by two hours' work at baking bread? 

Although my resolution was abandoned, this may be the best place to record 
the efforts of more doughty souls to carry out Tolstoy's conclusions. It 
was perhaps inevitable that Tolstoy colonies should be founded, although 
Tolstoy himself has always insisted that each man should live his life as 
nearly as possible in the place in which he was born. The visit Miss Smith 
and I made a year or two later to a colony in one of the southern States 
portrayed for us most vividly both the weakness and the strange august 
dignity of the Tolstoy position. The colonists at Commonwealth held but a 
short creed. They claimed in fact that the difficulty is not to state 
truth but to make moral conviction operative upon actual life, and they 
announced it their intention "to obey the teachings of Jesus in all 
matters of labor and the use of property." They would thus transfer the 
vindication of creed from the church to the open field, from dogma to 
experience. 

The day Miss Smith and I visited the Commonwealth colony of threescore 
souls, they were erecting a house for the family of a one-legged man, 
consisting of a wife and nine children who had come the week before in a 
forlorn prairie schooner from Arkansas. As this was the largest

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family the little colony contained, the new house was to be the largest 
yet erected. Upon our surprise at this literal giving "to him that
asketh," we inquired if the policy of extending food and shelter to all 
who applied, without test of creed or ability, might not result in the 
migration of all the neighboring poorhouse population into the colony. We 
were told that this actually had happened during the winter until the 
colony fare of corn meal and cow peas had proved so unattractive that the 
paupers had gone back, for even the poorest of the southern poorhouses 
occasionally supplied bacon with the pone if only to prevent scurvy from 
which the colonists themselves had suffered. The difficulty of the 
poorhouse people had thus settled itself by the sheer poverty of the 
situation, a poverty so biting that the only ones willing to face it were 
those sustained by a conviction of its righteousness. The fields and 
gardens were being worked by an editor, a professor, a clergyman, as well 
as by artisans and laborers, the fruit thereof to be eaten by themselves 
and their families or by any other families who might arrive from 
Arkansas. The colonists were very conventional in matters of family 
relationship and had broken with society only in regard to the conventions 
pertaining to labor and property. We had a curious experience at the end 
of the day, when we were driven into the nearest town. We had taken with 
us as a guest the wife of the president of the

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colony, wishing to give her a dinner at the hotel, because she had 
girlishly exclaimed during a conversation that at times during the winter 
she had become so eager to hear good music that it had seemed to her as if 
she were actually hungry for it, almost as hungry as she was for a 
beefsteak. Yet as we drove away we had the curious sensation that while 
the experiment was obviously coming to an end, in the midst of its 
privations it yet embodied the peace of mind which comes to him who 
insists upon the logic of life whether it is reasonable or not­the 
fanatic's joy in seeing his own formula translated into action. At any 
rate, as we reached the common-place southern town of workaday men and 
women, for one moment its substantial buildings, its solid brick churches, 
its ordered streets, divided into those of the rich and those of the poor, 
seemed much more unreal to us than the little struggling colony we had 
left behind. We repeated to each other that in all the practical judgments 
and decisions of life, we must part company with logical demonstration; 
that if we stop for it in each case, we can never go on at all; and yet, 
in spite of this, when conscience does become the dictator of the daily 
life of a group of men, it forces our admiration as no other modern 
spectacle has power to do. It seemed but a mere incident that this group 
should have lost sight of the facts of life in their earnest endeavor to 
put to the test the things of the spirit. 

I knew little about the colony started by Mr.

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Maude at Purleigh containing several of Tolstoy's followers who were not 
permitted to live in Russia, and we did not see Mr. Maude again until he 
came to Chicago on his way from Manitoba, whither he had transported the 
second group of Dukhobors, a religious sect who had interested all of 
Tolstoy's followers because of their literal acceptance of non-resistance 
and other Christian doctrines which are so strenuously advocated by 
Tolstoy. It was for their benefit that Tolstoy had finished and published 
"Resurrection," breaking through his long-kept resolution against novel 
writing. After the Dukhobors were settled in Canada, of the five hundred 
dollars left from the "Resurrection" funds, one half was given to Hull-
House. It seemed possible to spend this fund only for the relief of the 
most primitive wants of food and shelter on the part of the most needy 
families. 

[image caption: POLK STREET, OPPOSITE HULL-HOUSE.]



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CHAPTER XIII
PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS

ONE of the striking features of our neighborhood twenty years ago, and one 
to which we never became reconciled, was the presence of huge wooden 
garbage boxes fastened to the street pavement in which the undisturbed 
refuse accumulated day by day. The system of garbage collecting was 
inadequate throughout the city but it became the greatest menace in a ward 
such as ours, where the normal amount of waste was much increased by the 
decayed fruit and vegetables discarded by the Italian and Greek fruit 
peddlers, and by the residuum left over from the piles of filthy rags 
which were fished out of the city dumps and brought to the homes of the 
rag pickers for further sorting and washing.

The children of our neighborhood twenty years ago played their games in 
and around these huge garbage boxes. They were the first objects that the 
toddling child learned to climb; their bulk afforded a barricade and their 
contents provided missiles in all the battles of the older boys; and 
finally they became the seats upon which absorbed lovers held enchanted 
converse. We are obliged

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to remember that all children eat everything which they find and that 
odors have a curious and intimate power of entwining themselves into our 
tenderest memories, before even the residents

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of Hull-House can understand their own early enthusiasm for the removal of 
these boxes and the establishment of a better system of refuse collection.

It is easy for even the most conscientious citizen of Chicago to forget 
the foul smells of the stockyards and the garbage dumps, when he is living 
so far from them that he is only occasionally made conscious of their 
existence but the residents of a Settlement are perforce constantly 
surrounded by them. During our first three years on Halsted Street, we had 
established a small incinerator at Hull-House and we had many times 
reported the untoward conditions of the ward to the city hall. We had also 
arranged many talks for the immigrants, pointing out that although a woman 
may sweep her own doorway in her native village and allow the reuse to 
innocently decay in the open air and sunshine, in a crowded city quarter, 
if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed, a tenement-house 
mother may see her children sicken and die, and that the immigrants must 
therefore not only keep their own houses clean, but must also help the 
authorities to keep the city clean.

Possibly our efforts slightly modified the worst conditions, but they 
still remained intolerable, and the fourth summer the situation became for 
me absolutely desperate when I realized in a moment of panic that my 
delicate little nephew for whom

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I was guardian, could not be with me at Hull-House at all unless the 
sickening odors were reduced. I may well be ashamed that other delicate 
children who were torn from their families, not into boarding school but 
into eternity, had not long before driven me to effective action. Under 
the direction of the first man who came as a resident to Hull-House we 
began a systematic investigation of the city system of garbage collection, 
both as to its efficiency in other wards and its possible connection with 
the death rate in the various wards of the city.

The Hull-House Woman's Club had been organized the year before by the 
resident kindergartner who had first inaugurated a mother's meeting. The 
new members came together, however, in quite a new way that summer when we 
discussed with them the high death rate so persistent in our ward. After 
several club meetings devoted to the subject, despite the fact that the 
death rate rose highest in the congested foreign colonies and not in the 
streets in which most of the Irish American club women lived, twelve of 
their number undertook in connection with the residents, to carefully 
investigate the conditions of the alleys. During August and September the 
substantiated reports of violations of the law sent in from Hull-House to 
the health department were one thousand and thirty-seven. For the club 
woman who had finished a long day's work of washing or ironing

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followed by the cooking of a hot supper, it would have been much easier to 
sit on her doorstep during a summer evening than to go up and down ill-
kept alleys and get into trouble with her neighbors over the condition of 
their garbage boxes. It required both civic enterprise and moral 
conviction to be willing to do this three evenings a week during the 
hottest and most uncomfortable months of the year. Nevertheless, a certain 
number of women persisted, as did the residents, and three city inspectors 
in succession were transferred from the ward because of unsatisfactory 
services. Still the death rate remained high and the condition seemed 
little improved throughout the next winter. In sheer desperation, the 
following spring when the city contracts were awarded for the removal of 
garbage, with the backing of two well-known business men, I put in a bid 
for the garbage removal of the nineteenth ward. My paper was thrown out on 
a technicality but the incident induced the mayor to appoint me the 
garbage inspector of the ward.

The salary was a thousand dollars a year, and the loss of that political 
"plum" made a great stir among the politicians. The position was no 
sinecure whether regarded from the point of view of getting up at six in 
the morning to see that the men were early at work; or of following the 
loaded wagons, uneasily dropping their contents at intervals, to their 
dreary destination at the

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dump; or of insisting that the contractor must increase the number of his 
wagons from nine to thirteen and from thirteen to seventeen, although he 
assured me that he lost money on every one and that the former inspector 
had let him off with seven; or of taking careless landlords into court 
because they would not provide the proper garbage receptacles; or of 
arresting the tenant who tried to make the garbage wagons carry away the 
contents of his stable.

With the two or three residents who nobly stood by, we set up six of those 
doleful incinerators which are supposed to burn garbage with the fuel 
collected in the alley itself. The one factory in town which could utilize 
old tin cans was a window weight factory, and we deluged that with ten 
times as many tin cans as it could use­much less would pay for. We made 
desperate attempts to have the dead animals removed by the contractor who 
was paid most liberally by the city for that purpose but who, we slowly 
discovered, always made the police ambulances do the work, delivering the 
carcasses upon freight cars for shipment to a soap factory in Indiana 
where they were sold for a good price although the contractor himself was 
the largest stockholder in the concern. Perhaps our greatest achievement 
was the discovery of a pavement eighteen inches under the surface in a 
narrow street, although after it was found we triumphantly discovered a 
record of its existence in

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the city archives. The Italians living on the street were much interested 
but displayed little astonishment, perhaps because they were accustomed to 
see buried cities exhumed. This pavement became the casus belli between 
myself and the street commissioner when I insisted that its restoration 
belonged to him, after I had removed the first eight inches of garbage. 
The matter was finally settled by the mayor himself, who permitted me to 
drive him to the entrance of the street in what the children called my 
"garbage phaëton" and who took my side of the controversy.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, who had done some excellent 
volunteer inspection in both Chicago and Pittsburg, became my deputy and 
performed the work in a most thoroughgoing manner for three years. During 
the last two she was under the régime of civil service for in 1895, to the 
great joy of many citizens, the Illinois legislature made that possible.

Many of the foreign-born women of the ward were much shocked by this 
abrupt departure into the ways of men, and it took a great deal of 
explanation to convey the idea even remotely that if it were a womanly 
task to go about in tenement houses in order to nurse the sick, it might 
be quite as womanly to go through the same district in order to prevent 
the breeding of so-called "filth diseases." While some of the women 
enthusiastically approved the slowly changing condi-

Page 288

tions and saw that their housewifely duties logically extended to the 
adjacent alleys and streets, they yet were quite certain that "it was not 
a lady's job." A revelation of this attitude was made one day in a 
conversation which the inspector heard vigorously carried on in a laundry. 
One of the employees was leaving and was expressing her mind concerning 
the place in no measured terms, summing up her contempt for it as follows: 
"I would rather be the girl who goes about in the alleys than to stay here 
any longer!"

And yet the spectacle of eight hours' work for eight hours' pay, the even-
handed justice to all citizens irrespective of "pull," the dividing of 
responsibility between landlord and tenant, and the readiness to enforce 
obedience to law from both, was, perhaps, one of the most valuable 
demonstrations which could have been made. Such daily living on the part 
of the office holder is of infinitely more value than many talks on civics 
for, after all, we credit most easily that which we see. The careful 
inspection combined with other causes, brought about a great improvement 
in the cleanliness and comfort of the neighborhood and one happy day, when 
the death rate of our ward was found to have dropped from third to seventh 
in the list of city wards and was so reported to our Woman's Club, the 
applause which followed recorded the genuine sense of participation in the 
result, and a public spirit which had "made good."

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But the cleanliness of the ward was becoming much too popular to suit our 
all-powerful alderman and, although we felt fatuously secure under the 
régime of civil service, he found a way to circumvent us by eliminating 
the position altogether. He introduced an ordinance into the city council 
which combined the collection of refuse with the cleaning and repairing of 
the streets, the whole to be placed under a ward superintendent. The 
office of course was to be filled under civil service regulations but only 
men were eligible to the examination. Although this latter regulation was 
afterwards modified in favor of one woman, it was retained long enough to 
put the nineteenth ward inspector out of office.

Of course our experience in inspecting only made us more conscious of the 
wretched housing conditions over which we had been distressed from the 
first. It was during the World's Fair summer that one of the Hull-House 
residents in a public address upon housing reform used as an example of 
indifferent landlordism a large block in the neighborhood occupied by 
small tenements and stables unconnected with a street sewer, as was much 
similar property in the vicinity. In the lecture the resident spared 
neither a description of the property nor the name of the owner. The young 
man who owned the property was justly indignant at this public method of 
attack and promptly came to investigate the condition of the

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property. Together we made a careful tour of the houses and stables and in 
the face of the conditions that we found there, I could not but agree with 
him that supplying South Italian peasants with sanitary appliances seemed 
a difficult undertaking. Nevertheless he was unwilling that the block 
should remain in its deplorable state, and he finally cut through the 
dilemma with the rash proposition that he would give a free lease of the 
entire tract to Hull-House, accompanying the offer, however, with the 
warning remark, that if we should choose to use the income from the rents 
in sanitary improvements we should be throwing our money away.

Even when we decided that the houses were so bad that we could not 
undertake the task of improving them, he was game and stuck to his 
proposition that we should have a free lease. We finally submitted a plan 
that the houses should be torn down and the entire tract turned into a 
playground, although cautious advisers intimated that it would be very 
inconsistent to ask for subscriptions for the support of Hull-House when 
we were known to have thrown away an income of two thousand dollars a 
year. We, however, felt that a spectacle of inconsistency was better than 
one of bad landlordism and so the worst of the houses were demolished, the 
best three were sold and moved across the street under careful provision 
that they might never be used for junk-

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shops or saloons, and a public playground was finally established. Hull-
House became responsible for its management for ten years, at the end of 
which time it was turned over to the City Playground Commission although 
from the first the city detailed a policeman who was responsible for its 
general order and who became a valued adjunct of the House.

During fifteen years this public-spirited owner of the property paid all 
the taxes, and when the block was finally sold he made possible the 
playground equipment of a near-by schoolyard. On the other hand, the 
dispossessed tenants, a group of whom had to be evicted by legal process 
before their houses could be torn down, have never ceased to mourn their 
former estates. Only the other day I met upon the street an old Italian 
harness maker, who said that he had never succeeded so well anywhere else 
nor found a place that "seemed so much like Italy."

Festivities of various sorts were held on this early playground, always a 
May day celebration with its Maypole dance and its May queen. I remember 
that one year that honor of being queen was offered to the little girl who 
should pick up the largest number of scraps of paper which littered all 
the streets and alleys. The children that spring had been organized into a 
league, and each member had been provided with a stiff piece of wire upon 
the sharpened point of which stray bits

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of paper were impaled and later soberly counted off into a large box in 
the Hull-House alley. The little Italian girl who thus won the scepter 
took it very gravely as the just reward of hard labor, and we were all so 
absorbed in the desire for clean and tidy streets that we were wholly 
oblivious to the incongruity of thus selecting "the queen of love and 
beauty."

It was at the end of the second year that we received a visit from the 
warden of Toynbee Hall and his wife, as they were returning to England 
from a journey around the world. They had lived in East London for many 
years, and had been identified with the public movements for its 
betterment. They were much shocked that, in a new country with conditions 
still plastic and hopeful, so little attention had been paid to 
experiments and methods of amelioration which had already been tried; and 
they looked in vain through our library for blue books and governmental 
reports which recorded painstaking study into the conditions of English 
cities.

They were the first of a long line of English visitors to express the 
conviction that many things in Chicago were untoward not through paucity 
of public spirit but through a lack of political machinery adapted to 
modern city life. This was not all of the situation but perhaps no casual 
visitor could be expected to see that these matters of detail seemed 
unimportant to a city in the first 

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flush of youth, impatient of correction and convinced that all would be 
well with its future. The most obvious faults were those connected with 
the congested housing of the immigrant population, nine tenths of them 
from the country, who carried on all sorts of traditional activities in 
the crowded tenements. That a group of Greeks should be permitted to 
slaughter sheep in a basement, that Italian women should be allowed to 
sort over rags collected from the city dumps, not only within the city 
limits but in a court swarming with little children, that immigrant bakers 
should continue unmolested to bake bread for their neighbors in 
unspeakably filthy spaces under the pavement, appeared incredible to 
visitors accustomed to careful city regulations. I recall two visits made 
to the Italian quarter by John Burns­the second, thirteen years after the 
first. During the latter visit it seemed to him unbelievable that a 
certain house owned by a rich Italian should have been permitted to 
survive. He remembered with the greatest minuteness the positions of the 
houses on the court, with the exact space between the front and rear 
tenements, and he asked at once whether we had been able to cut a window 
into a dark hall as he had recommended thirteen years before. Although we 
were obliged to confess that the landlord would not permit the window to 
be cut, we were able to report that a City Homes Association had existed

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for ten years; that following a careful study of tenement conditions in 
Chicago, the text of which had been written by a Hull-House resident, the 
association had obtained the enactment of a model tenement-house code, and 
that their secretary had carefully watched the administration of the law 
for years so that its operation might not be minimized by the granting of 
too many exceptions in the city council. Our progress still seemed slow to 
Mr. Burns because in Chicago, the actual houses were quite unchanged, 
embodying features long since declared illegal in London. Only this year 
could we have reported to him, had he again come to challenge us, that the 
provisions of the law had at last been extended to existing houses and 
that a conscientious corps of inspectors under an efficient chief, were 
fast remedying the most glaring evils, while a band of nurses and doctors 
were following hard upon the "trail of the white hearse."

The mere consistent enforcement of existing laws and efforts for their 
advance often placed Hull-House, at least temporarily, into strained 
relations with its neighbors. I recall a continuous warfare against local 
landlords who would move wrecks of old houses as a nucleus for new ones in 
order to evade the provisions of the building code, and a certain Italian 
neighbor who was filled with bitterness because his new rear tenement was 
discovered to be illegal. It seemed impossible to

Page 296

make him understand that the health of the tenants was in any wise as 
important as his undisturbed rents. 

Nevertheless many evils constantly arise in Chicago from congested housing 
which wiser cities forestall and prevent; the inevitable boarders crowded 
into a dark tenement already too small for the use of the immigrant family 
occupying it; the surprisingly large number of delinquent girls who have 
become criminally involved with their own fathers and uncles; the school 
children who cannot find a quiet spot in which to read or study and who 
perforce go into the streets each evening; the tuberculosis superinduced 
and fostered by the inadequate rooms and breathing spaces. One of the Hull-
House residents, under the direction of a Chicago physician who stands 
high as an authority on tuberculosis and who devotes a large proportion of 
his time to our vicinity, made an investigation into housing conditions as 
related to tuberculosis with a result as startling as that of the "lung 
block" in New York.

It is these subtle evils of wretched and inadequate housing which are 
often the most disastrous. In the summer of 1902 during an epidemic of 
typhoid fever in which our ward, although containing but one thirty-sixth 
of the population of the city, registered one sixth of the total number of 
deaths, two of the Hull-House residents made an investigation of

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the methods of plumbing in the houses adjacent to conspicuous groups of 
fever cases. They discovered among the people who had been exposed to the 
infection, a widow who had lived in the ward for a number of years, in a 
comfortable little house of her own. Although the Italian immigrants were 
closing in all around her, she was not willing to sell her property and to 
move away until she had finished the education of her children. In the 
meantime she held herself quite aloof from her Italian neighbors and could 
never be drawn into any of the public efforts to secure a better code of 
tenement-house sanitation. Her two daughters were sent to an eastern 
college. One June when one of them had graduated and the other still had 
two years before she took her degree, they came to the spotless little 
house and their self-sacrificing mother for the summer holiday. They both 
fell ill with typhoid fever and one daughter died because the mother's 
utmost efforts could not keep the infection out of her own house. The 
entire disaster affords, perhaps, a fair illustration of the futility of 
the individual conscience which would isolate a family from the rest of 
the community and its interests.

The careful information collected concerning the juxtaposition of the 
typhoid cases to the various systems of plumbing and nonplumbing was made 
the basis of a bacteriological study by another resident, Dr. Alice 
Hamilton, as to the

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possibility of the infection having been carried by flies. Her researches 
were so convincing that they have been incorporated into the body of 
scientific data supporting that theory, but there were also practical 
results from the investigation. It was discovered that the wretched 
sanitary appliances through which alone the infection could have become so 
widely spread, would not have been permitted to remain, unless the city 
inspector had either been criminally careless or open to the arguments of 
favored landlords.

The agitation finally resulted in a long and stirring trial before the 
civil service board of half of the employees in the Sanitary Bureau, with 
the final discharge of eleven out of the entire force of twenty-four. The 
inspector in our neighborhood was a kindly old man, greatly distressed 
over the affair, and quite unable to understand why he should have not 
used his discretion as to the time when a landlord should be forced to put 
in modern appliances. If he was "very poor," or "just about to sell his 
place," or "sure that the house would be torn down to make room for a 
factory," why should one "inconvenience" him? The old man died soon after 
the trial, feeling persecuted to the very last and not in the least 
understanding what it was all about. We were amazed at the commercial 
ramifications which graft in the city hall involved and at the indignation 
which interference with it produced. Hull-House lost some large

Page 299

subscriptions as the result of this investigation, a loss which, if not 
easy to bear, was at least comprehensible. We also uncovered unexpected 
graft in connection with the plumbers' unions, and but for the fearless 
testimony of one of their members, could never have brought the trial to a 
successful issue.

Inevitable misunderstanding also developed in connection with the attempt 
on the part of Hull-House residents to prohibit the sale of cocaine to 
minors, which brought us into sharp conflict with many druggists. I recall 
an Italian druggist living on the edge of the neighborhood, who finally 
came with a committee of his countryman to see what Hull-House wanted of 
him, thoroughly convinced that no such effort could be disinterested. One 
dreary trial after another had been lost through the inadequacy of the 
existing legislation and after many attempts to secure better legal 
regulation of its sale, a new law with the coöperation of many agencies 
was finally secured in 1907. Through all this the Italian druggist, who 
had greatly profited by the sale of cocaine to boys, only felt outraged 
and abused. And yet the thought of this campaign brings before my mind 
with irresistible force, a young Italian boy who died,­a victim of the 
drug at the age of seventeen. He had been in our kindergarten as a 
handsome merry child, in our clubs as a vivacious boy, and then gradually 
there was an eclipse of

Page 300

all that was animated and joyous and promising, and when I at last saw him 
in his coffin, it was impossible to connect that haggard shriveled body 
with what I had known before.

A midwife investigation, undertaken in connection with the Chicago Medical 
Society, while showing the great need of further state regulation in the 
interest of the most ignorant mothers and helpless children, brought us 
into conflict with one of the most venerable of all customs. Was all this 
a part of the unending struggle between the old and new, or were these 
oppositions so unexpected and so unlooked for merely a reminder of that 
old bit of wisdom that "there is no guarding against interpretations"? 
Perhaps more subtle still, they were due to that very super-refinement of 
disinterestedness which will not justify itself, that it may feel superior 
to public opinion. Some of our investigations of course had no such 
untoward results, such as "An Intensive Study of Truancy" undertaken by a 
resident of Hull-House in connection with the compulsory education 
department of the Board of Education and the Visiting Nurses Association. 
The resident, Mrs. Britton, who, having had charge of our children's clubs 
for many years, knew thousands of children in the neighborhood, made a 
detailed study of three hundred families tracing back the habitual truancy 
of the child to economic and social causes. This investigation preceded a

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most interesting conference on truancy held under a committee of which I 
was a member from the Chicago Board of Education. It left lasting results 
upon the administration of the truancy law as well as the coöperation of 
volunteer bodies.

We continually conduct small but careful investigations at Hull-House, 
which may guide us in our immediate doings such as two recently undertaken 
by Mrs. Britton, one upon the reading of school children before new books 
were bought for the children's club libraries, and another on the 
proportion of tuberculosis among school children, before we opened a 
little experimental outdoor school on one of our balconies. Some of the 
Hull-House investigations are purely negative in result; we once made an 
attempt to test the fatigue of factory girls in order to determine how far 
overwork superinduced the tuberculosis to which such a surprising number 
of them were victims. The one scientific instrument it seemed possible to 
use was an ergograph, a complicated and expensive instrument kindly lent 
to us from the physiological laboratory of the University of Chicago. I 
remember the imposing procession we made from Hull-House to the factory 
full of working women, in which the proprietor allowed us to make the 
tests; first there was the precious instrument on a hand truck guarded by 
an anxious student and the young physician who was going to take the tests 
every afternoon; then

Page 302

there was Dr. Hamilton the resident in charge of the investigation, 
walking with a scientist who was interested to see that the instrument was 
properly installed; I followed in the rear to talk once more to the 
proprietor of the factory to be quite sure that he would permit the 
experiment to go on. The result of all this preparation, however, was to 
have the instrument record less fatigue at the end of the day than at the 
beginning, not because the girls had not worked hard and were not "dog 
tired" as they confessed, but because the instrument was not fitted to 
find it out.

For many years we have administered a branch station of the federal post 
office at Hull-House, which we applied for in the first instance because 
our neighbors lost such a large percentage of the money they sent to 
Europe, through the commissions to middle men. The experience in the post 
office constantly gave us data for urging the establishment of postal 
savings as we saw one perplexed immigrant after another turning away in 
bewilderment when he was told that the United States post office did not 
receive savings.

We find increasingly, however, that the best results are to be obtained in 
investigations as in other undertakings, by combining our researches with 
those of other public bodies or with the State itself. When all the 
Chicago Settlements found themselves distressed over the condition of the 
newsboys who, because they are merchants

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and not employees, do not come under the provisions of the Illinois child 
labor law, they united in the investigation of a thousand young newsboys, 
who were all interviewed on the streets during the same twenty-four hours. 
Their school and domestic status was easily determined later, for many of 
the boys lived in the immediate neighborhoods of the ten Settlements which 
had undertaken the investigation. The report embodying the results of the 
investigation recommended a city ordinance containing features from the 
Boston and Buffalo regulations, and although an ordinance was drawn up and 
a strenuous effort was made to bring it to the attention of the aldermen, 
none of them would introduce it into the city council without newspaper 
backing. We were able to agitate for it again at the annual meeting of the 
National Child Labor Committee which was held in Chicago in 1908, and 
which was of course reported in papers throughout the entire country. This 
meeting also demonstrated that local measures can sometimes be urged most 
effectively when joined to the efforts of a national body. Undoubtedly the 
best discussions ever held upon the operation and status of the Illinois 
law were those which took place then. The needs of the Illinois children 
were regarded in connection with the children of the nation and advanced 
health measures for Illinois were compared with those of other states.

The investigations of Hull-House thus tend to be

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merged with those of larger organizations, from the investigation of the 
social value of saloons made for the Committee of Fifty in 1896, to the 
one on infant mortality in relation to nationality, made for the American 
Academy of Science in 1909. This is also true of Hull-House activities in 
regard to public movements, some of which are inaugurated by the residents 
of other Settlements, as the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, 
founded by the splendid efforts of Dr. Graham Taylor for many years head 
of Chicago Commons. All of our recent investigations into housing have 
been under the department of investigation of this school with which 
several of the Hull-House residents are identified, quite as our active 
measures to secure better housing conditions have been carried on with the 
City Homes Association and through the coöperation of one of our residents 
who several years ago was appointed a sanitary inspector on the city staff.

Perhaps Dr. Taylor himself offers the best possible example of the value 
of Settlement experience to public undertakings, in his manifold public 
activities of which one might instance his work at the moment upon a 
commission recently appointed by the governor of Illinois to report upon 
the best method of Industrial Insurance or Employer's Liability Acts, and 
his influence in securing another to study into the subject of Industrial 
Diseases. The actual factory investigation under

Page 305

the latter is in charge of Dr. Hamilton, of Hull-House, whose long 
residence in an industrial neighborhood as well as her scientific 
attainment, give her peculiar qualifications for the undertaking.

And so a Settlement is led along from the concrete to the abstract, as may 
easily be illustrated. Many years ago a tailors' union meeting at Hull-
House asked our coöperation in tagging the various parts of a man's coat 
in such wise as to show the money paid to the people who had made it; one 
tag for the cutting and another for the buttonholes, another for the 
finishing and so on, the resulting total to be compared with the selling 
price of the coat itself. It quickly became evident that we had no way of 
computing how much of this larger balance was spent for salesmen, 
commercial travelers, rent and management, and the poor tagged coat was 
finally left hanging limply in a closet as if discouraged with the 
attempt. But the desire of the manual worker to know the relation of his 
own labor to the whole is not only legitimate but must form the basis of 
any intelligent action for his improvement. It was therefore with the hope 
of reform in the sewing trades that the Hull-House residents testified 
before the Federal Industrial Commission in 1900, and much later with 
genuine enthusiasm joined with trades-unionists and other public-spirited 
citizens in an industrial exhibit which made a graphic presentation of the 
conditions and rewards of labor.

Page 306

The large casino building in which it was held was filled every day and 
evening for two weeks, showing how popular such information is, if it can 
be presented graphically. As an illustration of this same moving from the 
smaller to the larger, I might instance the efforts of Miss McDowell of 
the University of Chicago Settlement and others in urging upon Congress 
the necessity for a special investigation into the conditions of women and 
children in industry because we had discovered the insuperable 
difficulties of smaller investigations, notably one undertaken for the 
Illinois Bureau of Labor by Mrs. Van der Vaart of Neighborhood House and 
by Miss Breckinridge of the University of Chicago. This investigation made 
clear that it was as impossible to detach the girls working in the 
stockyards from their sisters in industry as it was to urge special 
legislation on their behalf.

In the earlier years of the American Settlements, the residents were 
sometimes impatient with the accepted methods of charitable administration 
and hoped, through residence in an industrial neighborhood, to discover 
more coöperative and advanced methods of dealing with the problems of 
poverty which are so dependent upon industrial maladjustment. But during 
twenty years, the Settlements have seen the charitable people, through 
their very knowledge of the poor, constantly approach nearer to those 
methods formerly designated as radical. The residents, so far from holding 
aloof from

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organized charity, find testimony, certainly in the National Conferences, 
that out of the most persistent and intelligent efforts to alleviate 
poverty will in all probability arise the most significant suggestions for 
eradicating poverty. In the hearing before a congressional committee for 
the establishment of a Children's Bureau, residents in American 
Settlements joined their fellow philanthropists in urging the need of this 
indispensable instrument for collecting and disseminating information 
which would make possible concerted intelligent action on behalf of 
children.

Mr. Howells has said that we are all so besotted with our novel reading 
that we have lost the power of seeing certain aspects of life with any 
sense of reality because we are continually looking for the possible 
romance. The description might apply to the earlier years of the American 
settlement, but certainly the later years are filled with discoveries in 
actual life as romantic as they are unexpected. If I may illustrate one of 
these romantic discoveries from my own experience, I would cite the 
indications of an internationalism as sturdy and virile as it is 
unprecedented which I have seen in our cosmopolitan neighborhood: when a 
South Italian Catholic is forced by the very exigencies of the situation 
to make friends with an Austrian Jew representing another nationality and 
another religion, both of which cut into all his most cherished 
prejudices, he finds it harder to utilize them a

Page 308

second time and gradually loses them. He thus modifies his provincialism, 
for if an old enemy working by his side has turned into a friend, almost 
anything may happen. When, therefore, I became identified with the peace 
movement both in its International and National Conventions, I hoped that 
this internationalism engendered in the immigrant quarters of American 
cities might be recognized as an effective instrument in the cause of 
peace. I first set it forth with some misgiving before the Convention held 
in Boston in 1904 and it is always a pleasure to recall the hearty assent 
given to it by Professor William James.

I have always objected to the phrase "sociological laboratory" applied to 
us, because Settlements should be something much more human and 
spontaneous than such a phrase connotes, and yet it is inevitable that the 
residents should know their own neighborhoods more thoroughly than any 
other, and that their experiences there should affect their convictions.

Years ago I was much entertained by a story told at the Chicago Woman's 
Club by one of its ablest members in the discussion following a paper of 
mine on "The Outgrowths of Toynbee Hall." She said that when she was a 
little girl playing in her mother's garden, she one day discovered a small 
toad who seemed to her very forlorn and lonely, although she did not in 
the least know how to comfort him, she reluctantly left him to

Page 309

his fate; later in the day, quite at the other end of the garden, she 
found a large toad, also apparently without family and friends. With a 
heart full of tender sympathy, she took a stick and by exercising infinite 
patience and some skill, she finally pushed the little toad through the 
entire length of the garden into the company of the big toad, when, to her 
inexpressible horror and surprise, the big toad opened his mouth and 
swallowed the little one. The moral of the tale was clear applied to 
people who lived "where they did not naturally belong," although I 
protested that was exactly what we wanted­to be swallowed and digested, to 
disappear into the bulk of the people.

Twenty years later I am willing to testify that something of the sort does 
take place after years of identification with an industrial community.



Page 310

CHAPTER XIV
CIVIC COÖPERATION

ONE of the first lessons we learned at Hull-House was that private 
beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the 
city's disinherited. We also quickly came to realize that there are 
certain types of wretchedness from which every private philanthropy 
shrinks and which are cared for only in those wards of the county hospital 
provided for the wrecks of vicious living or in the city's isolation 
hospital for smallpox patients. 

I have heard a broken-hearted mother exclaim when her erring daughter came 
home at last too broken and diseased to be taken into the family she had 
disgraced, "There is no place for her but the top floor of the County 
Hospital; they will have to take her there," and this only after every 
possible expedient had been tried or suggested. This aspect of 
governmental responsibility was unforgettably borne in upon me during the 
smallpox epidemic following the World's Fair, when one of the residents, 
Mrs. Kelley, as State Factory Inspector, was much concerned in discovering 
and destroying clothing which was being 

[image caption: JULIA C. LATHROP.]

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finished in houses containing unreported cases of smallpox. The deputy 
most successful in locating such cases lived at Hull-House during the 
epidemic because he did not wish to expose his own family. Another 
resident, Miss Lathrop, as a member of the State Board of Charities, went 
back and forth to the crowded pest house which had been hastily 
constructed on a stretch of prairie west of the city. As Hull-House was 
already so exposed, it seemed best for the special smallpox inspectors 
from the Board of Health to take their meals and change their clothing 
there before they went to their respective homes. All of these officials 
had accepted without question and as implicit in public office the 
obligation to carry on the dangerous and difficult undertakings for which 
private philanthropy is unfitted, as if the commonalty of compassion 
represented by the State was more comprehending than that of any 
individual group. 

It was as early as our second winter on Halsted Street that one of the 
Hull-House residents received an appointment from the Cook County agent as 
a county visitor. She reported at the agency each morning, and all the 
cases within a radius of ten blocks from Hull-House were given to her for 
investigation. This gave her a legitimate opportunity for knowing the 
poorest people in the neighborhood and also for understanding the county 
method of outdoor relief. The com-

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missioners were at first dubious of the value of such a visitor and 
predicted that a woman would be a perfect "coal chute" for giving away 
county supplies, but they gradually came to depend upon her suggestion and 
advice. 

In 1893 this same resident, Miss Julia C. Lathrop, was appointed by the 
governor a member of the Illinois State Board of Charities. She served in 
this capacity for two consecutive terms and was later reappointed to a 
third term. Perhaps her most valuable contribution toward the enlargement 
and reorganization of the charitable institutions of the State came 
through her intimate knowledge of the beneficiaries, and her experience 
demonstrated that it is only through long residence among the poor that an 
official could have learned to view public institutions as she did, from 
the standpoint of the inmates rather than from that of the managers. Since 
that early day, residents of Hull-House have spent much time in working 
for the civil service methods of appointment for employees in the county 
and State institutions; for the establishment of State colonies for the 
care of epileptics; and for a dozen other enterprises which occupy that 
borderland between charitable effort and legislation. In this borderland 
we coöperate in many civic enterprises for I think we may claim that Hull-
House has always held its activities lightly, ready to hand them over to 
whosoever would carry them on properly.

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Miss Starr had early made a collection of framed photographs, largely of 
the paintings studied in her art class, which became the basis of a loan 
collection first used by the Hull-House students and later extended to the 
public schools. It may be fair to suggest that this effort was the nucleus 
of the Public School Art Society which was later formed in the city and of 
which Miss Starr was the first president. 

In our first two summers we had maintained three baths in the basement of 
our own house for the use of the neighborhood, and they afforded some 
experience and argument for the erection of the first public bathhouse in 
Chicago, which was built on a neighboring street and opened under the city 
Board of Health. The lot upon which it was erected belonged to a friend of 
Hull-House who offered it to the city without rent, and this enabled the 
city to erect the first public bath from the small appropriation of ten 
thousand dollars. Great fear was expressed by the public authorities that 
the baths would not be used, and the old story of the bathtubs in model 
tenements which had been turned into coal bins was often quoted to us. We 
were supplied, however, with the incontrovertible argument that in our 
adjacent third square mile there were in 1892 but three bathtubs and that 
this fact was much complained of by many of the tenement-house dwellers. 
Our contention was justified by the

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immediate and overflowing use of the public baths, as we had before been 
sustained in the contention that an immigrant population would respond to 
opportunities for reading when the Public Library Board had established a 
branch reading room at Hull-House.

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We also quickly discovered that nothing brought us so absolutely into 
comradeship with our neighbors as mutual and sustained effort such as the 
paving of a street, the closing of a gambling house, or the restoration of 
a veteran police sergeant. 

Several of these earlier attempts at civic coöperation were undertaken in 
connection with the Hull-House Men's Club, which had been organized in the 
spring of 1893, had been incorporated under a State charter of its own, 
and had occupied a club room in the gymnasium building. This club obtained 
an early success in one of the political struggles in the ward and thus 
fastened upon itself a specious reputation for political power. It was at 
last so torn by the dissensions of two political factions which attempted 
to capture it that, although it is still an existing organization, it has 
never regained the prestige of its first five years. Its early political 
success came in a campaign Hull-House had instigated against a powerful 
alderman who has held office for more than twenty years in the nineteenth 
ward, and who, although notoriously corrupt, is still firmly intrenched 
among his constituents. 

Hull-House has had to do with three campaigns organized against him. In 
the first one he was apparently only amused at our "Sunday School" effort 
and did little to oppose the election to the aldermanic office of a member 
of the Hull-House Men's Club who thus became his

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colleague in the city council. When Hull-House, however, made an effort in 
the following spring against the re-election of the alderman himself, we 
encountered the most determined and skillful opposition. In these 
campaigns we doubtless depended too much upon the idealistic appeal for we 
did not yet comprehend the element of reality always brought into the 
political struggle in such a neighborhood where politics deal so directly 
with getting a job and earning a living. 

We soon discovered that approximately one out of every five voters in the 
nineteenth ward at that time held a job dependent upon the good will of 
the alderman. There were no civil service rules to interfere, and the 
unskilled voter swept the street and dug the sewer, as secure in his 
position as the more sophisticated voter who tended a bridge or occupied 
an office chair in the city hall. The alderman was even more fortunate in 
finding places with the franchise-seeking corporations; it took us some 
time to understand why so large a proportion of our neighbors were street-
car employees and why we had such a large club composed solely of 
telephone girls. Our powerful alderman had various methods of entrenching 
himself. Many people were indebted to him for his kindly services in the 
police station and the justice courts, for in those days Irish 
constituents easily broke the peace, and before the establishment of the 
Juvenile Court, boys were arrested for very trivial offenses; added

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to these were hundreds of constituents indebted to him for personal 
kindness, from the peddler who received a free license to the businessman 
who had a railroad pass to New York. Our third campaign against him, when 
we succeeded in making a serious impression upon his majority, evoked from 
his henchmen the same sort of hostility which a striker so inevitably 
feels against the man who would take his job, even sharpened by the sense 
that the movement for reform came from an alien source. 

Another result of the campaign was an expectation on the part of our new 
political friends that Hull-House would perform like offices for them, and 
there resulted endless confusion and misunderstanding because in many 
cases we could not even attempt to do what the alderman constantly did 
with a right good will. When he protected a law breaker from the legal 
consequences of his act, his kindness appeared, not only to himself but to 
all beholders, like the deed of a powerful and kindly statesman. When Hull-
House on the other hand insisted that a law must be enforced, it could but 
appear like the persecution of the offender. We were certainly not anxious 
for consistency nor for individual achievement, but in a desire to foster 
a higher political morality and not to lower our standards, we constantly 
clashed with the existing political code. We also unwittingly stumbled 
upon a powerful combination of which

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our alderman was the political head, with its banking, its ecclesiastical, 
and its journalistic representatives, and as we followed up the clue and 
naively told all we discovered, we of course laid the foundations for 
opposition which has manifested itself in many forms; the most striking 
expression of it was an attack upon Hull-House lasting through weeks and 
months by a Chicago daily newspaper which has since ceased publication. 

During the third campaign I received many anonymous letters­those from the 
men often obscene, those from the women revealing that curious connection 
between prostitution and the lowest type of politics which every city 
tries in vain to hide. I had offers from the men in the city prison to 
vote properly if released; various communications from lodging-house 
keepers as to the prices of the vote they were ready to deliver; 
everywhere appeared that animosity which is evoked only when a man feels 
that his means of livelihood is threatened. 

As I look back, I am reminded of the state of mind of Kipling's 
newspapermen who witnessed a volcanic eruption at sea, in which 
unbelievable deep-sea creatures were expelled to the surface, among them 
an enormous white serpent, blind and smelling of musk, whose death throes 
thrashed the sea into a fury. With professional instinct unimpaired, the 
journalists carefully observed the uncanny creature never designed for the 
eyes of

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men; but a few days later, when they found themselves in a comfortable 
second-class carriage, traveling from Southampton to London between trim 
hedgerows and smug English villages, they concluded that the experience 
was too sensational to be put before the British public, and it became 
improbable even to themselves. 

Many subsequent years of living in kindly neighborhood fashion with the 
people of the nineteenth ward has produced upon my memory the soothing 
effect of the second-class railroad carriage and many of these political 
experiences have not only become remote but already seem improbable. On 
the other hand, these campaigns were not without their rewards; one of 
them was a quickened friendship both with the more substantial citizens in 
the ward and with a group of fine young voters whose devotion to Hull-
House has never since failed; another was a sense of identification with 
public-spirited men throughout the city who contributed money and time to 
what they considered a gallant effort against political corruption. I 
remember a young professor from the University of Chicago who with his 
wife came to live at Hull-House, traveling the long distance every day 
throughout the autumn and winter that he might qualify as a nineteenth-
ward voter in the spring campaign. He served as a watcher at the polls and 
it was but a poor reward for his devotion that he was literally set upon 
and beaten

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up, for in those good old days such things frequently occurred. Many 
another case of devotion to our standard so recklessly raised might be 
cited, but perhaps more valuable than any of these was the sense of 
identification we obtained with the rest of Chicago. 

So far as a Settlement can discern and bring to local consciousness 
neighborhood needs which are common needs, and can give vigorous help to 
the municipal measures through which such needs shall be met, it fulfills 
its most valuable function. To illustrate from our first effort to improve 
the street paving in the vicinity, we found that when we had secured the 
consent of the majority of the property owners on a given street for a new 
paving, the alderman checked the entire plan through his kindly service to 
one man who had appealed to him to keep the assessments down. The street 
long remained a shocking mass of wet, dilapidated cedar blocks, where 
children were sometimes mired as they floated a surviving block in the 
water which speedily filled the holes whence other blocks had been 
extracted for fuel. And yet when we were able to demonstrate that the 
street paving had thus been reduced into cedar pulp by the heavily loaded 
wagons of an adjacent factory, that the expense of its repaving should be 
borne from a general fund and not by the poor property owners, we found 
that we could all unite in advocating reform in the method of repaving 
assessments, and

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the alderman himself was obliged to come into such a popular movement. The 
Nineteenth Ward Improvement Association which met at Hull-House during two 
winters, was the first body of citizens

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able to make a real impression upon the local paving situation. They 
secured an expert to watch the paving as it went down to be sure that 
their half of the paving money was well expended. In the belief that 
property values would be thus enhanced, the common aim brought together 
the more prosperous people of the vicinity, somewhat as the Hull-House 
Coöperative Coal Association brought together the poorer ones. 
I remember that during the second campaign against our alderman, Governor 
Pingree of Michigan came to visit at Hull-House. He said that the 
stronghold of such a man was not the place in which to start municipal 
regeneration; that good aldermen should be elected from the promising 
wards first, until a majority of honest men in the city council should 
make politics unprofitable for corrupt men. We replied that it was 
difficult to divide Chicago into good and bad wards, but that a new 
organization called the Municipal Voters' League was attempting to give to 
the well-meaning voter in each ward throughout the city accurate 
information concerning the candidates and their relation, past and 
present, to vital issues. One of our trustees who was most active in 
inaugurating this League always said that his nineteenth-ward experience 
had convinced him of the unity of city politics, and that he constantly 
used our campaign as a challenge to the unaroused citizens living in wards 
less conspicuously corrupt.

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Certainly the need for civic cooperation was obvious in many directions, 
and in none more strikingly than in that organized effort which must be 
carried on unceasingly if young people are to be protected from the darker 
and coarser dangers of the city. The cooperation between Hull-House and 
the Juvenile Protective Association came about gradually, and it seems now 
almost inevitably. From our earliest days we saw many boys constantly 
arrested, and I had a number of most enlightening experiences in the 
police station with an Irish lad whose mother upon her deathbed had begged 
me "to look after him." We were distressed by the gangs of very little 
boys who would sally forth with an enterprising leader in search of old 
brass and iron, sometimes breaking into empty houses for the sake of the 
faucets or lead pipe which they would sell for a good price to a junk 
dealer. With the money thus obtained they would buy cigarettes and beer or 
even candy, which could be conspicuously consumed in the alleys where they 
might enjoy the excitement of being seen and suspected by the "coppers." 
From the third year of Hull-House, one of the residents held a 
semiofficial position in the nearest police station; at least, the 
sergeant agreed to give her provisional charge of every boy and girl under 
arrest for a trivial offense. 

Mrs. Stevens, who performed this work for several years, became the first 
probation officer of

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the Juvenile Court when it was established in Cook County in 1899. She was 
the sole probation officer at first, but at the time of her death, which 
occurred at Hull-House in 1900, she was the senior officer of a corps of 
six. Her entire experience had fitted her to deal wisely with wayward 
children. She had gone into a New England cotton mill at the age of 
thirteen, where she had promptly lost the index finger of her right hand, 
through "carelessness" she was told, and no one then seemed to understand 
that freedom from care was the prerogative of childhood. Later she became 
a typesetter and was one of the first women in America to become a member 
of the typographical union, retaining her "card" through all the later 
years of editorial work. As the Juvenile Court developed, the committee of 
public-spirited citizens who first supplied only Mrs. Stevens' salary 
later maintained a corps of twenty-two such officers; several of these 
were Hull-House residents who brought to the house for many years a sad 
little procession of children struggling against all sorts of handicaps. 
When legislation was secured which placed the probation officers upon the 
payroll of the county, it was a challenge to the efficiency of the civil 
service method of appointment to obtain by examination men and women 
fitted for this delicate human task. As one of five people asked by the 
civil service commission to conduct this first examination for probation

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officers, I became convinced that we were but at the beginning of the 
nonpolitical method of selecting public servants, but even stiff and 
unbending as the examination may be, it is still our hope of political 
salvation. 

In 1907, the Juvenile Court was housed in a model court building of its 
own, containing a detention home and equipped with a competent staff. The 
committee of citizens largely responsible for this result thereupon turned 
their attention to the conditions which the records of the court indicated 
had led to the alarming amount of juvenile delinquency and crime. They 
organized the Juvenile Protective Association, whose twenty-two officers 
meet weekly at Hull-House with their executive committee to report what 
they have found and to discuss city conditions affecting the lives of 
children and young people. 

The association discovers that there are certain temptations into which 
children so habitually fall that it is evident that the average child 
cannot withstand them. An overwhelming mass of data is accumulated showing 
the need of enforcing existing legislation and of securing new 
legislation, but it also indicates a hundred other directions in which the 
young people who so gaily walk our streets, often to their own 
destruction, need safeguarding and protection. 

The effort of the association to treat the youth of the city with 
consideration and understanding

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has rallied the most unexpected forces to its standard. Quite as the basic 
needs of life are supplied solely by those who make money out of the 
business, so the modern city has assumed that the craving for pleasure 
must be ministered to only by the sordid. This assumption, however, in a 
large measure broke down as soon as the Juvenile Protective Association 
courageously put it to the test. After persistent prosecutions, but also 
after many friendly interviews, the Druggists' Association itself 
prosecutes those of its members who sell indecent postal cards; the Saloon 
Keepers' Protective Association not only declines to protect members who 
sell liquor to minors, but now takes drastic action to prevent such sales; 
the Retail Grocers' Association forbids the selling of tobacco to minors; 
the Association of Department Store Managers not only increased the 
vigilance in their waiting rooms by supplying more matrons, but as a body 
they have become regular contributors to the association; the special 
watchmen in all the railroad yards agree not to arrest trespassing boys 
but to report them to the association; the firms manufacturing moving 
picture films not only submit their films to a volunteer inspection 
committee, but ask for suggestions in regard to new matter; and the Five-
Cent Theaters arrange for "stunts" which shall deal with the subject of 
public health and morals, when the lecturers provided are entertaining as 
well as instructive.

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It is not difficult to arouse the impulse of protection for the young, 
which would doubtless dictate the daily acts of many a bartender and 
poolroom keeper if they could only indulge it without giving their rivals 
an advantage. When this difficulty is removed by an even-handed 
enforcement of the law, that simple kindliness which the innocent always 
evoke goes from one to another like a slowly spreading flame of good will. 
Doubtless the most rewarding experience in any such undertaking as that of 
the Juvenile Protective Association is the warm and intelligent 
cooperation coming from unexpected sources­official and commercial as well 
as philanthropic. Upon the suggestion of the association, social centers 
have been opened in various parts of the city, disused buildings turned 
into recreation rooms, vacant lots made into gardens, hiking parties 
organized for country excursions, bathing beaches established on the lake 
front, and public schools opened for social purposes. Through the efforts 
of public-spirited citizens a medical clinic and a Psychopathic Institute 
have become associated with the Juvenile Court of Chicago, in addition to 
which an exhaustive study of court-records has been completed. To this 
carefully collected data concerning the abnormal child, the Juvenile 
Protective Association hopes in time to add knowledge of the normal child 
who lives under the most adverse city conditions. 

It was not without hope that I might be able

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to forward in the public school system the solution of some of these 
problems of delinquency so dependent upon truancy and ill-adapted 
education that I became a member of the Chicago Board of Education in 
July, 1905. It is impossible to write of the situation as it became 
dramatized in half a dozen strong personalities, but the entire experience 
was so illuminating as to the difficulties and limitations of democratic 
government that it would be unfair in a chapter on Civic Cooperation not 
to attempt an outline. 

Even the briefest statement, however, necessitates a review of the 
preceding few years. For a decade the Chicago school teachers, or rather a 
majority of them who were organized into the Teachers' Federation, had 
been engaged in a conflict with the Board of Education both for more 
adequate salaries and for more self-direction in the conduct of the 
schools. In pursuance of the first object, they had attacked the tax 
dodger along the entire line of his defense, from the curbstone to the 
Supreme Court. They began with an intricate investigation which uncovered 
the fact that in 1899, $235,000,000 of value of public utility 
corporations paid nothing in taxes. The Teachers' Federation brought a 
suit which was prosecuted through the Supreme Court of Illinois and 
resulted in an order entered against the State Board of Equalization, 
demanding that it tax the corporations mentioned in the bill. In spite of

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the fact that the defendant companies sought federal aid and obtained an 
order which restrained the payment of a portion of the tax, each year 
since 1900, the Chicago Board of Education has benefited to the extent of 
more than a quarter of a million dollars. Although this result had been 
attained through the unaided efforts of the teachers, to their surprise 
and indignation their salaries were not increased. The Teachers' 
Federation, therefore, brought a suit against the Board of Education for 
the advance which had been promised them three years earlier but never 
paid. The decision of the lower court was in their favor, but the Board of 
Education appealed the case, and this was the situation when the seven new 
members appointed by Mayor Dunne in 1905 took their seats. The 
conservative public suspected that these new members were merely 
representatives of the Teachers' Federation. This opinion was founded upon 
the fact that Judge Dunne had rendered a favorable decision in the 
teachers' suit and that the teachers had been very active in the campaign 
which had resulted in his election as mayor of the city. It seemed obvious 
that the teachers had entered into politics for the sake of securing their 
own representatives on the Board of Education. These suspicions were, of 
course, only confirmed when the new board voted to withdraw the suit of 
their predecessors from the Appellate Court and to act upon the decision of

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the lower court. The teachers, on the other hand, defended their long 
effort in the courts, the State Board of Equalization, and the Legislature 
against the charge of "dragging the schools into politics," and declared 
that the exposure of the indifference and cupidity of the politicians was 
a well-deserved rebuke, and that it was the politicians who had brought 
the schools to the verge of financial ruin; they further insisted that the 
levy and collection of taxes, tenure of office, and pensions to civil 
servants in Chicago were all entangled with the traction situation, which 
in their minds at least had come to be an example of the struggle between 
the democratic and plutocratic administration of city affairs. The new 
appointees to the School Board represented no concerted policy of any 
kind, but were for the most part adherents to the new education. The 
teachers, confident that their cause was identical with the principles 
advocated by such educators as Colonel Parker, were therefore sure that 
the plans of the "new education" members would of necessity coincide with 
the plans of the Teachers' Federation. In one sense the situation was an 
epitome of Mayor Dunne's entire administration, which was founded upon the 
belief that if those citizens representing social ideals and reform 
principles were but appointed to office, public welfare must be 
established. 

During my tenure of office I many times talked to the officers of the 
Teachers' Federation, but I

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was seldom able to follow their suggestions and, although I gladly 
cooperated in their plans for a better pension system and other matters, 
only once did I try to influence the policy of the Federation. When the 
withheld salaries were finally paid to the representatives of the 
Federation who had brought suit and were divided among the members who had 
suffered both financially and professionally during this long legal 
struggle, I was most anxious that the division should voluntarily be 
extended to all of the teachers who had experienced a loss of salary 
although they were not members of the Federation. It seemed to me a 
striking opportunity to refute the charge that the Federation was self-
seeking and to put the whole long effort in the minds of the public, 
exactly where it belonged, as one of devoted public service. But it was 
doubtless much easier for me to urge this altruistic policy than it was 
for those who had borne the heat and burden of the day to act upon it. 

The second object of the Teachers' Federation also entailed much stress 
and storm. At the time of the financial stringency, and largely as a 
result of it, the Board had made the first substantial advance in a 
teacher's salary dependent upon a so-called promotional examination, half 
of which was upon academic subjects entailing a long and severe 
preparation. The teachers resented this upon two lines of argument: first, 
that

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the scheme was unprofessional in that the teacher was advanced on her 
capacity as a student rather than on her professional ability; and, 
second, that it added an intolerable and unnecessary burden to her already 
overfull day. The administration, on the other hand, contended with much 
justice that there was a constant danger in a great public school system 
that teachers lose pliancy and the open mind, and that many of them had 
obviously grown mechanical and indifferent. The conservative public 
approved the promotional examinations as the symbol of an advancing 
educational standard, and their sympathy with the superintendent was 
increased because they continually resented the affiliation of the 
Teachers' Federation with the Chicago Federation of Labor, which had taken 
place several years before the election of Mayor Dunne on his traction 
platform. 

This much talked of affiliation between the teachers and the trades-
unionists had been, at least in the first instance, but one more tactic in 
the long struggle against the tax-dodging corporations. The Teachers' 
Federation had won in their first skirmish against that public 
indifference which is generated in the accumulation of wealth and which 
has for its nucleus successful commercial men. When they found themselves 
in need of further legislation to keep the offending corporations under 
control, they naturally turned for political influence and votes to the 
organization

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representing workingmen. The affiliation had none of the sinister meaning 
so often attached to it. The Teachers' Federation never obtained a charter 
from the American Federation of Labor, and its main interest always 
centered in the legislative committee. 

And yet this statement of the difference between the majority of the grade-
school teachers and the Chicago School Board is totally inadequate, for 
the difficulties were stubborn and lay far back in the long effort of 
public school administration in America to free itself from the rule and 
exploitation of politics. In every city for many years the politician had 
secured positions for his friends as teachers and janitors; he had 
received a rake-off in the contract for every new building or coal supply 
or adoption of school-books. In the long struggle against this political 
corruption, the one remedy continually advocated was the transfer of 
authority in all educational matters from the Board to the superintendent. 
The one cure for "pull" and corruption was the authority of the "expert." 
The rules and records of the Chicago Board of Education are full of relics 
of this long struggle honestly waged by honest men, who unfortunately 
became content with the ideals of an "efficient business administration." 
These businessmen established an able superintendent with a large salary, 
with his tenure of office secured by State law so that

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he would not be disturbed by the wrath of the balked politician. They 
instituted impersonal examinations for the teachers both as to entrance 
into the system and promotion, and they proceeded "to hold the 
superintendent responsible" for smooth-running schools. All this, however, 
dangerously approximated the commercialistic ideal of high salaries only 
for the management with the final test of a small expense account and a 
large output. 

In this long struggle for a quarter of a century to free the public 
schools from political interference, in Chicago at least, the high wall of 
defense erected around the school system in order "to keep the rascals 
out" unfortunately so restricted the teachers inside the system that they 
had no space in which to move about freely and the more adventurous of 
them fairly panted for light and air. Any attempt to lower the wall for 
the sake of the teachers within was regarded as giving an opportunity to 
the politicians without, and they were often openly accused, with a show 
of truth, of being in league with each other. Whenever the Dunne members 
of the Board attempted to secure more liberty for the teachers, we were 
warned by tales of former difficulties with the politicians, and it seemed 
impossible that the struggle so long the focus of attention should recede 
into the dullness of the achieved and allow the energy of the Board to be 
free for new effort.

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The whole situation between the superintendent supported by a majority of 
the Board and the Teachers' Federation had become an epitome of the 
struggle between efficiency and democracy; on one side a well-intentioned 
expression of the bureaucracy necessary in a large system but which under 
pressure had become unnecessarily self-assertive, and on the other side a 
fairly militant demand for self-government made in the name of freedom. 
Both sides inevitably exaggerated the difficulties of the situation, and 
both felt that they were standing by important principles. 

I certainly played a most inglorious part in this unnecessary conflict; I 
was chairman of the School Management Committee during one year when a 
majority of the members seemed to me exasperatingly conservative, and 
during another year when they were frustratingly radical, and I was of 
course highly unsatisfactory to both. Certainly a plan to retain the 
undoubted benefit of required study for teachers in such wise as to lessen 
its burden, and various schemes devised to shift the emphasis from 
scholarship to professional work, were mostly impatiently repudiated by 
the Teachers' Federation, and when one badly mutilated plan finally passed 
the Board, it was most reluctantly administered by the superintendent. 

I at least became convinced that partisans would never tolerate the use of 
stepping-stones. They are much too impatient to look on while

Page 336

their beloved scheme is unstably balanced, and they would rather see it 
tumble into the stream at once than to have it brought to dry land in any 
such half-hearted fashion. Before my School Board experience, I thought 
that life had taught me at least one hard-earned lesson, that existing 
arrangements and the hoped for improvements must be mediated and 
reconciled to each other, that the new must be dovetailed into the old as 
it were, if it were to endure; but on the School Board I discerned that 
all such efforts were looked upon as compromising and unworthy, by both 
partisans. In the general disorder and public excitement resulting from 
the illegal dismissal of a majority of the "Dunne" board and their 
reinstatement by a court decision, I found myself belonging to neither 
party. During the months following the upheaval and the loss of my most 
vigorous colleagues, under the regime of men representing the leading 
Commercial Club of the city who honestly believed that they were rescuing 
the schools from a condition of chaos, I saw one beloved measure after 
another withdrawn. Although the new president scrupulously gave me the 
floor in the defense of each, it was impossible to consider them upon 
their merits in the lurid light which at the moment enveloped all the 
plans of the "uplifters." Thus the building of smaller schoolrooms, such 
as in New York mechanically avoid overcrowding, the extension of the 
truant rooms

Page 337

so successfully inaugurated, the multiplication of school playgrounds, and 
many another cherished plan was thrown out or at least indefinitely 
postponed. 

The final discrediting of Mayor Dunne's appointees to the School Board 
affords a very interesting study in social psychology; the newspapers had 
so constantly reflected and intensified the ideals of a business Board, 
and had so persistently ridiculed various administration plans for the 
municipal ownership of street railways, that from the beginning any 
attempt the new Board made to discuss educational matters only excited 
their derision and contempt. Some of these discussions were lengthy and 
disorderly and deserved the discipline of ridicule, but others which were 
well conducted and in which educational problems were seriously set forth 
by men of authority were ridiculed quite as sharply. I recall the surprise 
and indignation of a University professor who had consented to speak at a 
meeting arranged in the Board rooms, when next morning his nonpartisan and 
careful disquisition had been twisted into the most arrant uplift nonsense 
and so connected with a fake newspaper report of a trial marriage address 
delivered, not by himself, but by a colleague, that a leading clergyman of 
the city, having read the newspaper account, felt impelled to preach a 
sermon, calling upon all decent people to rally against the doctrines 
which were being taught to

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the children by an immoral School Board. As the bewildered professor had 
lectured in response to my invitation, I endeavored to find the animus of 
the complication, but neither from editor in chief nor from the reporter 
could I discover anything more sinister than that the public expected a 
good story out of these School Board "talk fests," and that any man who 
even momentarily allied himself with a radical administration must expect 
to be ridiculed by those papers which considered the traction policy of 
the administration both foolish and dangerous. 

As I myself was treated with uniform courtesy by the leading papers, I may 
perhaps here record my discouragement over this complicated difficulty of 
open discussion, for democratic government is founded upon the assumption 
that differing policies shall be freely discussed and that each party 
shall have an opportunity for at least a partisan presentation of its 
contentions. This attitude of the newspapers was doubtless intensified 
because the Dunne School Board had instituted a lawsuit challenging the 
validity of the lease for the school ground occupied by a newspaper 
building. This suit has since been decided in favor of the newspaper, and 
it may be that in their resentment they felt justified in doing everything 
possible to minimize the prosecuting School Board. I am, however, inclined 
to think that the newspapers but reflected an opinion honestly held by

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many people, and that their constant and partisan presentation of this 
opinion clearly demonstrates one of the greatest difficulties of 
governmental administration in a city grown too large for verbal 
discussions of public affairs. 

It is difficult to close this chapter without a reference to the efforts 
made in Chicago to secure the municipal franchise for women. During two 
long periods of agitation for a new city charter, a representative body of 
women appealed to the public, to the charter convention, and to the 
Illinois legislature for this very reasonable provision. During the 
campaign when I acted as chairman of the federation of a hundred women's 
organizations, nothing impressed me so forcibly as the fact that the 
response came from bodies of women representing the most varied 
traditions. We were joined by a church society of hundreds of Lutheran 
women, because Scandinavian women had exercised the municipal franchise 
since the seventeenth century and had found American cities strangely 
conservative; by organizations of working women who had keenly felt the 
need of the municipal franchise in order to secure for their workshops the 
most rudimentary sanitation and the consideration which the vote alone 
obtains for workingmen; by federations of mothers' meetings, who were 
interested in clean milk and the extension of kindergartens; by property-
owning women, who had been powerless to protest against unjust taxa-

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tion; by organizations of professional women, of university students, and 
of collegiate alumnæ; and by women's clubs interested in municipal 
reforms. There was a complete absence of the traditional women's rights 
clamor, but much impressive testimony from busy and useful women that they 
had reached the place where they needed the franchise in order to carry on 
their own affairs. A striking witness as to the need of the ballot, even 
for the women who are restricted to the most primitive and traditional 
activities, occurred when some Russian women waited upon me to ask whether 
under the new charter they could vote for covered markets and so get rid 
of the shocking Chicago grime upon all their food; and when some 
neighboring Italian women sent me word that they would certainly vote for 
public washhouses if they ever had the chance to vote at all. It was all 
so human, so spontaneous, and so direct that it really seemed as if the 
time must be ripe for political expression of that public concern on the 
part of women which had so long been forced to seek indirection. None of 
these busy women wished to take the place of men nor to influence them in 
the direction of men's affairs, but they did seek an opportunity to 
cooperate directly in civic life through the use of the ballot in regard 
to their own affairs. 

A Municipal Museum which was established in the Chicago public library 
building several years ago, largely through the activity of a group of

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women who had served as jurors in the departments of social economy, of 
education, and of sanitation in the World's Fair at St. Louis, showed 
nothing more clearly than that it is impossible to divide any of these 
departments from the political life of the modern city which is constantly 
forced to enlarge the boundary of its activity.