Twenty Years at Hull-House - Chapters XV-XVI



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CHAPTER XV
THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS

FROM the early days at Hull-House, social clubs composed of English 
speaking American born young people grew apace. So eager were they for 
social life that no mistakes in management could drive them away. I 
remember one enthusiastic leader who read aloud to a club a translation of 
"Antigone," which she had selected because she believed that the great 
themes of the Greek poets were best suited to young people. She came into 
the club room one evening in time to hear the president call the restive 
members to order with the statement, "You might just as well keep quiet 
for she is bound to finish it, and the quicker she gets to reading, the 
longer time we'll have for dancing." And yet the same club leader had the 
pleasure of lending four copies of the drama to four of the members, and 
one young man almost literally committed the entire play to memory.

On the whole we were much impressed by the great desire for self-
improvement, for study and debate, exhibited by many of the young men. 
This very tendency, in fact, brought one of the most promising of our 
earlier clubs to an untimely

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end. The young men in the club, twenty in number, had grown much irritated 
by the frivolity of the girls during their long debates, and had finally 
proposed that three of the most "frivolous" be expelled. Pending a final 
vote, the three culprits appealed to certain of their friends who were 
members of the Hull-House Men's Club, between whom and the debating young 
men the incident became the cause of a quarrel so bitter that at length it 
led to a shooting. Fortunately the shot missed fire, or it may have been 
true that it was "only intended for a scare," but at any rate, we were all 
thoroughly frightened by this manifestation of the hot blood which the 
defense of woman has so often evoked. After many efforts to bring about a 
reconciliation, the debating club of twenty young men and the seventeen 
young women, who either were or pretended to be sober minded, rented a 
hall a mile west of Hull-House severing their connection with us because 
their ambitious and right-minded efforts had been unappreciated, basing 
this on the ground that we had not urged the expulsion of the so-called 
"tough" members of the Men's Club, who had been involved in the 
difficulty. The seceding club invited me to the first meeting in their new 
quarters that I might present to them my version of the situation and set 
forth the incident from the standpoint of Hull-House. The discussion I had 
with the young people that evening has always remained with me

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as one of the moments of illumination which life in a Settlement so often 
affords. In response to my position that a desire to avoid all that was 
"tough" meant to walk only in the paths of smug self-seeking and personal 
improvement leading straight into the pit of self-righteousness and petty 
achievement and was exactly what the Settlement did not stand for, they 
contended with much justice that ambitious young people were obliged for 
their own reputation, if not for their own morals, to avoid all connection 
with that which bordered on the tough, and that it was quite another 
matter for the Hull-House residents who could afford a more generous 
judgment. It was in vain I urged that life teaches us nothing more 
inevitably than that right and wrong are most confusingly confounded; that 
the blackest wrong may be within our own motives, and that at the best, 
right will not dazzle us by its radiant shining and can only be found by 
exerting patience and discrimination. They still maintained their 
wholesome bourgeois position, which I am now quite ready to admit was most 
reasonable.

Of course there were many disappointments connected with these clubs when 
the rewards of political and commercial life easily drew the members away 
from the principles advocated in club meetings. One of the young men who 
had been a shining light in the advocacy of municipal reform deserted in 
the middle of a reform campaign

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because he had been offered a lucrative office in the city hall; another 
even after a course of lectures on business morality, "worked" the club 
itself to secure orders for custom-made clothing from samples of cloth he 
displayed, although the orders were filled by ready-made suits slightly 
refitted and delivered at double their original price. But nevertheless, 
there was much to cheer us as we gradually became acquainted with the 
daily living of the vigorous young men and women who filled to overflowing 
all the social clubs.

We have been much impressed during our twenty years, by the ready 
adaptation of city young people to the prosperity arising from their own 
increased wages or from the commercial success of their families. This 
quick adaptability is the great gift of the city child, his one reward for 
the hurried changing life which he has always led. The working girl has a 
distinct advantage in the task of transforming her whole family into the 
ways and connections of the prosperous when she works down town and 
becomes conversant with the manners and conditions of a cosmopolitan 
community. Therefore having lived in a Settlement twenty years, I see 
scores of young people who have successfully established themselves in 
life, and in my travels in the city and outside, I am constantly cheered 
by greetings from the rising young lawyer, the scholarly rabbi, the 
successful teacher, the prosperous young matron buying

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clothes for blooming children. "Don't you remember me? I used to belong to 
a Hull-House club."  I once asked one of these young people, a man who 
held a good position on a Chicago daily, what special thing Hull-House had 
meant to him, and he promptly replied, "It was the first house I had ever 
been in where books and magazines just lay around as if there were plenty 
of them in the world. Don't you remember how much I used to read at that 
little round table at the back of the library? To have people regard 
reading as a reasonable occupation changed the whole aspect of life to me 
and I began to have confidence in what I could do." 

Among the young men of the social clubs a large proportion of the Jewish 
ones at least obtain the advantages of a higher education. The parents 
make every sacrifice to help them through the high school after which the 
young men attend universities and professional schools, largely through 
their own efforts. From time to time they come

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back to us with their honors thick upon them; I remember one who returned 
with the prize in oratory from a contest between several western State 
universities, proudly testifying that he had obtained his confidence in 
our Henry Clay Club; another came back with a degree from Harvard 
University saying that he had made up his mind to go there the summer I 
read Royce's "Aspects of Modern Philosophy" with a group of young men who 
had challenged my scathing remark that Herbert Spencer was not the only 
man who had ventured a solution of the riddles of the universe. 
Occasionally one of these learned young folk does not like to be reminded 
he once lived in our vicinity, but that happens rarely, and for the most 
part they are loyal to us in much the same spirit as they are to their own 
families and traditions. Sometimes they go further and tell us that the 
standards of tastes and code of manners which Hull-House has enabled them 
to form, have made a very great difference in their perceptions and 
estimates of the larger world as well as in their own reception there. 
Five out of one club of twenty-five young men who had held together for 
eleven years, entered the University of Chicago but although the rest of 
the Club called them the "intellectuals," the old friendships still held.

In addition to these rising young people given to debate and dramatics, 
and to the members of

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the public school alumni associations which meet in our rooms, there are 
hundreds of others who for years have come to Hull-House frankly in search 
of that pleasure and recreation which all young things crave and which 
those who have spent long hours in a factory or shop demand as a right. 
For these young people all sorts of pleasure clubs have been cherished, 
and large dancing classes have been organized. One supreme gayety has come 
to be an annual event of such importance that it is talked of from year to 
year. For six weeks before St. Patrick's day, a small group of residents 
put their best powers of invention and construction into preparation for a 
cotillion which is like a pageant in its gayety and vigor. The parents sit 
in the gallery, and the mothers appreciate more than anyone else perhaps, 
the value of this ball to which an invitation is so highly prized; 
although their standards of manners may differ widely from the 
conventional, they know full well when the companionship of the young 
people is safe and unsullied.

As an illustration of this difference in standard, I may instance an early 
Hull-House picnic arranged by a club of young people, who found at the 
last moment that the club director could not go and accepted the offer of 
the mother of one of the club members to take charge of them. When they 
trooped back in the evening, tired and happy, they displayed a photograph 
of the group

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wherein each man's arm was carefully placed about a girl; no feminine 
waist lacked an arm save that of the proud chaperon, who sat in the middle 
smiling upon all. Seeing that the photograph somewhat surprised us, the 
chaperon stoutly explained, "This may look queer to you, but there wasn't 
one thing about that picnic that wasn't nice," and her statement was a 
perfectly truthful one.

Although more conventional customs are carefully enforced at our many 
parties and festivities, and while the dancing classes are as highly 
prized for the opportunity they afford for enforcing standards as for 
their ostensible aim, the residents at Hull-House, in their efforts to 
provide opportunities for clean recreation, receive the most valued help 
from the experienced wisdom of the older women of the neighborhood. Bowen 
Hall is constantly used for dancing parties with soft drinks established 
in its foyer. The parties given by the Hull-House clubs are by invitation 
and the young people themselves carefully maintain their standard of 
entrance so that the most cautious mother may feel safe when her daughter 
goes to one of our parties. No club festivity is permitted without the 
presence of a director; no young man under the influence of liquor is 
allowed; certain types of dancing often innocently started are strictly 
prohibited; and above all, early closing is insisted upon. This 
standardizing of pleasure has always

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seemed an obligation to the residents of Hull-House, but we are, I hope, 
saved from that priggishness which young people so heartily resent, by the 
Mardi Gras dance and other festivities which the residents themselves 
arrange and successfully carry out.

In spite of our belief that the standards of a ball may be almost as 
valuable to those without as to those within, the residents are constantly 
concerned for those many young people in the neighborhood who are too 
hedonistic to submit to the discipline of a dancing class or even to the 
claim of a pleasure club, but who go about in freebooter fashion to find 
pleasure wherever it may be cheaply on sale.

Such young people, well meaning but impatient of control, become the easy 
victims of the worst type of public dance halls, and of even darker 
places, whose purposes are hidden under music and dancing. We were 
thoroughly frightened when we learned that during the year which ended 
last December, more than twenty-five thousand young people under the age 
of twenty-five passed through the Juvenile and Municipal Courts of 
Chicago­approximately one out of every eighty of the entire population, or 
one out of every fifty-two of those under twenty-five years of age. One's 
heart aches for these young people caught by the outside glitter of city 
gayety, who make such a feverish attempt to snatch it for

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themselves. The young people in our clubs are comparatively safe, but many 
instances come to the knowledge of Hull-House residents which make us long 
for the time when the city, through more small parks, municipal 
gymnasiums, and schoolrooms open for recreation, can guard from disaster 
these young people who walk so carelessly on the edge of the pit.

The heedless girls believe that if they lived in big houses and possessed 
pianos and jewelry, the coveted social life would come to them. I know a 
Bohemian girl who surreptitiously saved her overtime wages until she had 
enough money to hire for a week a room with a piano in it where young men 
might come to call, as they could not do in her crowded untidy home. Of 
course she had no way of knowing the sort of young men who quickly 
discover an unprotected girl. 

Another girl of American parentage who had come to Chicago to seek her 
fortune, found at the end of a year that sorting shipping receipts in a 
dark corner of a warehouse not only failed to accumulate riches but did 
not even bring the "attentions" which her quiet country home afforded. By 
dint of long sacrifice she had saved fifteen dollars; with five she bought 
an imitation sapphire necklace, and the balance she changed into a ten 
dollar bill. The evening her pathetic little snare was set, she walked 
home with one of the clerks in the establishment, told him that she

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had come into a fortune, and was obliged to wear the heirloom necklace to 
insure its safety, permitted him to see that she carried ten dollars in 
her glove for carfare, and conducted him to a handsome Prairie Avenue 
residence. There she gayly bade him good-by and ran up the steps shutting 
herself in the vestibule from which she did not emerge until the dazzled 
and bewildered young man had vanished down the street.

Then there is the ever-recurring difficulty about dress; the insistence of 
the young to be gayly bedecked to the utter consternation of the 
hardworking parents who are paying for a house and lot. The Polish girl 
who stole five dollars from her employer's till with which to buy a white 
dress for a church picnic was turned away from home by her indignant 
father who replaced the money to save the family honor, but would harbor 
no "thief" in a household of growing children who, in spite of the 
sister's revolt, continued to be dressed in dark heavy clothes through all 
the hot summer. There are a multitude of working girls who for hours carry 
hair ribbons and jewelry in their pockets or stockings, for they can wear 
them only during the journey to and from work. Sometimes this desire to 
taste pleasure, to escape into a world of congenial companionship takes 
more elaborate forms and often ends disastrously. I recall a charming 
young girl, the oldest daughter of a respectable German family, whom I 
first saw

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one spring afternoon issuing from a tall factory. She wore a blue print 
gown which so deepened the blue of her eyes that Wordsworth's line fairly 
sung itself:

The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze
On some gray rock. 

I was grimly reminded of that moment a year later when I heard the tale of 
this seventeen-year-old girl, who had worked steadily in the same factory 
for four years before she resolved "to see life." In order not to arouse 
her parents' suspicions, she borrowed thirty dollars from one of those 
loan sharks who require no security from a pretty girl, so that she might 
start from home every morning as if to go to work. For three weeks she 
spent the first part of each dearly bought day in a department store where 
she lunched and unfortunately made some dubious acquaintances; in the 
afternoon she established herself in a theater and sat contentedly hour 
after hour watching the endless vaudeville until the usual time for 
returning home. At the end of each week she gave her parents her usual 
wage, but when her thirty dollars was exhausted it seemed unendurable that 
she should return to the monotony of the factory. In the light of her 
newly acquired experience she had learned that possibility which the city 
ever holds open to the restless girl.

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That more such girls do not come to grief is due to those mothers who 
understand the insatiable demand for a good time, and if all of the 
mothers did understand, those pathetic statistics which show that four 
fifths of all prostitutes are under twenty years of age would be 
marvelously changed.  We are told that "the will to live" is aroused in 
each baby by his mother's irresistible desire to play with him, the 
physiological value of joy that a child is born, and that the high death 
rate in institutions is increased by "the discontented babies" whom no one 
persuades into living. Something of the same sort is necessary in that 
second birth at adolescence. The young people need affection and 
understanding each one for himself, if they are to be induced to live in 
an inheritance of decorum and safety and to understand the foundations 
upon which this orderly

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world rests. No one comprehends their needs so sympathetically as those 
mothers who iron the flimsy starched finery of their grown-up daughters 
late into the night, and who pay for a red velvet parlor set on the 
installment plan, although the younger children may sadly need new shoes. 
These mothers apparently understand the sharp demand for social pleasure 
and do their best to respond to it, although at the same time they 
constantly minister to all the physical needs of an exigent family of 
little children. We often come to a realization of the truth of Walt 
Whitman's statement, that one of the surest sources of wisdom is the 
mother of a large family.

It is but natural, perhaps, that the members of the Hull-House Woman's 
Club whose prosperity has given them some leisure and a chance to remove 
their own families to neighborhoods less full of temptations, should have 
offered their assistance in our attempt to provide recreation for these 
restless young people. In many instances their experience in the club 
itself has enabled them to perceive these needs. One day a Juvenile Court 
officer told me that a woman's club member, who has a large family of her 
own and one boy sufficiently difficult, had undertaken to care for a ward 
of the Juvenile Court who lived only a block from her house, and that she 
had kept him in the path of rectitude for six months. In reply to my 
congratulations upon this successful

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bit of reform to the club woman herself, she said that she was quite 
ashamed that she had not undertaken the task earlier for she had for years 
known the boy's mother who scrubbed a downtown office building, leaving 
home every evening at five and returning at eleven during the very time 
the boy could most easily find opportunities for wrongdoing. She said that 
her obligation toward this boy had not occurred to her until one day when 
the club members were making pillowcases for the Detention Home of the 
Juvenile Court, it suddenly seemed perfectly obvious that her share in the 
salvation of wayward children was to care for this particular boy and she 
had asked the Juvenile Court officer to commit him to her. She invited the 
boy to her house to supper every day that she might know just where he was 
at the crucial moment of twilight, and she adroitly managed to keep him 
under her own roof for the evening if she did not approve of the plans he 
had made. She concluded with the remark that it was queer that the sight 
of the boy himself hadn't appealed to her, but that the suggestion had 
come to her in such a roundabout way.

She was, of course, reflecting upon a common trait in human nature,­that 
we much more easily see the duty at hand when we see it in relation to the 
social duty of which it is a part. When she knew that an effort was being 
made through-

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out all the large cities in the United States to reclaim the wayward boy, 
to provide him with reasonable amusement, to give him his chance for 
growth and development, and when she became ready to take her share in 
that movement, she suddenly saw the concrete case which she had not 
recognized before. 

We are slowly learning that social advance depends quite as much upon an 
increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty, and of this 
one could cite many illustrations. I was at one time chairman of the Child 
Labor Committee in the General Federation of Woman's Clubs, which sent out 
a schedule asking each club in the United States to report as nearly as 
possible all the working children under fourteen living in its vicinity. A 
Florida club filled out the schedule with an astonishing number of Cuban 
children who were at work in sugar mills, and the club members registered 
a complaint that our committee had sent the schedule too late, for if they 
had realized the conditions earlier, they might have presented a bill to 
the legislature which had now adjourned. Of course the children had been 
working in the sugar mills for years, and had probably gone back and forth 
under the very eyes of the club women, but the women had never seen them, 
much less felt any obligation to protect them, until they joined a club, 
and the club joined a Federation, and the Federation appointed a Child 
Labor

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Committee who sent them a schedule. With their quickened perceptions they 
then saw the rescue of these familiar children in the light of a social 
obligation. Through some such experiences the members of the Hull-House 
Woman's Club have obtained the power of seeing the concrete through the 
general and have entered into various undertakings.

Very early in its history the club formed what was called "A Social 
Extension Committee." Once a month this committee gives parties to people 
in the neighborhood who for any reason seem forlorn and without much 
social pleasure. One evening they invited only Italian women, thereby 
crossing a distinct social "gulf," for there certainly exists as great a 
sense of social difference between the prosperous Irish-American women and 
the South-Italian peasants as between any two sets of people in the city 
of Chicago. The Italian women, who were almost eastern in their habits, 
all stayed at home and sent their husbands, and the social extension 
committee entered the drawing room to find it occupied by rows of Italian 
workingmen, who seemed to prefer to sit in chairs along the wall. They 
were quite ready to be "socially extended," but plainly puzzled as to what 
it was all about. The evening finally developed into a very successful 
party, not so much because the committee were equal to it, as because the 
Italian men rose to the occasion.

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Untiring pairs of them danced the tarantella; they sang Neapolitan songs; 
one of them performed some of those wonderful sleight-of-hand tricks so 
often seen on the streets of Naples; they explained the coral finger of 
St. Januarius which they wore; they politely ate the strange American 
refreshments; and when the evening was over, one of the committee said to 
me, "Do you know I am ashamed of the way I have always talked about
'dagos,' they are quite like other people, only one must take a little 
more pains with them. I have been nagging my husband to move off M Street 
because they are moving in, but I am going to try staying awhile and see 
if I can make a real acquaintance with some of them." To my mind at that 
moment the speaker had passed from the region of the uncultivated person 
into the possibilities of the cultivated person. The former is bounded by 
a narrow outlook on life, unable to overcome differences of dress and 
habit, and his interests are slowly contracting within a circumscribed 
area; while the latter constantly tends to be more a citizen of the world 
because of his growing understanding of all kinds of people with their 
varying experiences. We send our young people to Europe that they may lose 
their provincialism and be able to judge their fellows by a more universal 
test, as we send them to college that they may attain the cultural 
background and a larger outlook; all of

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these it is possible to acquire in other ways, as this member of the 
woman's club had discovered for herself. 

This social extension committee under the leadership of an ex-president of 
the Club, a Hull-House resident with a wide acquaintance, also discover 
many of those lonely people of which every city contains so large a 
number. We are only slowly apprehending the very real danger to the 
individual who fails to establish some sort of genuine relation with the 
people who surround him. We are all more or less familiar with the results 
of isolation in rural districts; the Brontë sisters have portrayed the 
hideous immorality and savagery of the remote dwellers on the bleak 
moorlands of northern England; Miss Wilkins has written of the 
overdeveloped will of the solitary New Englander; but tales still wait to 
be told of the isolated city dweller. In addition to the lonely young man 
recently come to town, and the country family who have not yet made their 
connections, are many other people who, because of temperament or from an 
estimate of themselves which will not permit them to make friends with the 
"people around here," or who, because they are victims to a combination of 
circumstances, lead a life as lonely and untouched by the city about them 
as if they were in remote country districts. The very fact that it 
requires an effort to preserve isolation from the tenement-house life 
which flows all about them, makes the

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character stiffer and harsher than mere country solitude could do.

Many instances of this come into my mind; the faded, ladylike hairdresser, 
who came and went to her work for twenty years, carefully concealing her 
dwelling place from the "other people in the shop," moving whenever they 
seemed too curious about it, and priding herself that no neighbor had ever 
"stepped inside her door," and yet when discovered through an asthma which 
forced her to crave friendly offices, she was most responsive and even gay 
in a social atmosphere. Another woman made a long effort to conceal the 
poverty resulting from her husband's inveterate gambling and to secure for 
her children the educational advantages to which her family had always 
been accustomed. Her five children, who are now university graduates, do 
not realize how hard and solitary was her early married life when we first 
knew her, and she was beginning to regret the isolation in which her 
children were being reared, for she saw that their lack of early 
companionship would always cripple their power to make friends. She was 
glad to avail herself of the social resources of Hull-House for them, and 
at last even for herself.

The leader of the social extension committee has also been able, through 
her connection with the vacant lot garden movement in Chicago, to maintain 
a most flourishing "friendly club" largely

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composed of people who cultivate these garden plots. During the club 
evening at least, they regain something of the ease of the man who is 
being estimated by the bushels per acre of potatoes he has raised, and not 
by that flimsy city judgment so often based upon store clothes. Their 
jollity and enthusiasm are unbounded, expressing itself in clog dances and 
rousing old songs often in sharp contrast to the overworked, worn aspects 
of the members.

Of course there are surprising possibilities discovered through other 
clubs, in one of Greek women or in the "circolo Italiano," for a social 
club often affords a sheltered space in which the gentler social usages 
may be exercised, as the more vigorous clubs afford a point of departure 
into larger social concerns.

The experiences of the Hull-House Woman's Club constantly react upon the 
family life of the members. Their husbands come with them to the annual 
midwinter reception, to club concerts and entertainments; the little 
children come to the May party, with its dancing and games; the older 
children, to the day in June when prizes are given to those sons and 
daughters of the members who present a good school record as graduates 
either from the eighth grade or from a high school.

It seemed, therefore, but a fit recognition of their efforts when the 
president of the club erected a building planned especially for their

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needs, with their own library and a hall large enough for their various 
social undertakings, although of course Bowen Hall is constantly put to 
many other uses.

It was under the leadership of this same able president that the club 
achieved its wider purposes and took its place with the other forces for 
city

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betterment. The club had begun, as nearly all women's clubs do, upon the 
basis of self-improvement, although the foundations for this later 
development had been laid by one of their earliest presidents, who was the 
first probation officer of the Juvenile Court, and who had so shared her 
experiences with the club that each member felt the truth as well as the 
pathos of the lines inscribed on her memorial tablet erected in their club 
library:­

"As more exposed to suffering and distress
Thence also more alive to tenderness." 

Each woman had discovered opportunities in her own experience for this 
same tender understanding, and under its succeeding president, Mrs. 
Pelham, in its determination to be of use to the needy and distressed, the 
club developed many philanthropic undertakings from the humble beginnings 
of a linen chest kept constantly filled with clothing for the sick and 
poor. It required, however, an adequate knowledge of adverse city 
conditions so productive of juvenile delinquency and a sympathy which 
could enkindle itself in many others of divers faiths and training, to 
arouse the club to its finest public spirit. This was done by a later 
president, Mrs. Bowen, who, as head of the Juvenile Protective 
Association, had learned that the moralized energy of a group is best 
fitted to cope with the complicated problems of a city; but it required 
ability of an un-

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usual order to evoke a sense of social obligation from the very knowledge 
of adverse city conditions which the club members possessed, and to 
connect it with the many civic and philanthropic organizations of the city 
in such wise as to make it socially useful. This financial and 
representative connection with outside organizations, is valuable to the 
club only as it expresses its sympathy and kindliness at the same time in 
concrete form. A group of members who lunch with Mrs. Bowen each week at 
Hull-House discuss, not only topics of public interest, sometimes with 
experts whom they have long known through their mutual undertakings, but 
also their own club affairs in the light of this larger knowledge.

Thus the value of social clubs broadens out in one's mind to an instrument 
of companionship through which many may be led from a sense of isolation 
to one of civic responsibility, even as another type of club provides 
recreational facilities for those who have had only meaningless 
excitements, or, as a third type, opens new and interesting vistas of life 
to those who are ambitious.

The entire organization of the social life at Hull-House, while it has 
been fostered and directed by residents and others, has been largely 
pushed and vitalized from within by the club members themselves. Sir 
Walter Besant once told me that Hull-House stood in his mind more nearly 
for the ideal of the "Palace of Delight" than did the

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"London People's Palace" because we had depended upon the social resources 
of the people using it. He begged me not to allow Hull-House to become too 
educational. He believed it much easier to develop a polytechnic institute 
than a large recreational center, but he doubted whether the former was as 
useful.

The social clubs form a basis of acquaintanceship for many people living 
in other parts of the city. Through friendly relations with individuals, 
which is perhaps the sanest method of approach, they are thus brought into 
contact, many of them for the first time, with the industrial and social 
problems challenging the moral resources of our contemporary life. During 
our twenty years hundreds of these non-residents have directed clubs and 
classes, and have increased the number of Chicago citizens who are 
conversant with adverse social conditions and conscious that only by the 
unceasing devotion of each, according to his strength, shall the 
compulsions and hardships, the stupidities and cruelties of life be 
overcome. The number of people thus informed is constantly increasing in 
all our American cities, and they may in time remove the reproach of 
social neglect and indifference which has so long rested upon the citizens 
of the new world. I recall the experience of an Englishman who, not only 
because he was a member of the Queen's Cabinet and bore a title, but also 
because he was an able statesman, was

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entertained with great enthusiasm by the leading citizens of Chicago.  At 
a large dinner party he asked the lady sitting next to him what our 
tenement-house legislation was in regard to the cubic feet of air required 
for each occupant of a tenement bedroom; upon her disclaiming any 
knowledge of the subject, the inquiry was put to all the diners at the 
long table, all of whom showed surprise that they should be expected to 
possess this information. In telling me the incident afterward, the 
English guest said that such indifference could not have been found among 
the leading citizens of London, whose public spirit had been aroused to 
provide such housing conditions as should protect tenement dwellers at 
least from wanton loss of vitality and lowered industrial efficiency. When 
I met the same Englishman in London five years afterward, he immediately 
asked me whether Chicago

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citizens were still so indifferent to the conditions of the poor that they 
took no interest in their proper housing. I was quick with that defense 
which an American is obliged to use so often in Europe, that our very 
democracy so long presupposed that each citizen could care for himself 
that we are slow to develop a sense of social obligation. He smiled at the 
familiar phrases and was still inclined to attribute our indifference to 
sheer ignorance of social conditions.

The entire social development of Hull-House is so unlike what I predicted 
twenty years ago, that I venture to quote from that ancient writing as an 
end to this chapter. 

The social organism has broken down through large districts of our great 
cities. Many of the people living there are very poor, the majority of 
them without leisure or energy for anything but the gain of subsistence.

They live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of 
each other, without fellowship, without local tradition or public spirit, 
without social organization of any kind. Practically nothing is done to 
remedy this. The people who might do it, who have the social tact and 
training, the large houses, and the traditions and customs of hospitality, 
live in other parts of the city. The club houses, libraries, galleries, 
and semi-public conveniences for social life are also blocks away. We find 
workingmen organized into armies of producers because men of executive 
ability and business sagacity have found it to their

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interests thus to organize them. But these workingmen are not organized 
socially; although lodging in crowded tenement houses, they are living 
without a corresponding social contact. The chaos is as great as it would 
be were they working in huge factories without foremen or superintendent. 
Their ideas and resources are cramped, and the desire for higher social 
pleasure becomes extinct. They have no share in the traditions and social 
energy which make for progress. Too often their only place of meeting is a 
saloon, their only host a bartender; a local demagogue forms their public 
opinion. Men of ability and refinement, of social power and university 
cultivation, stay away from them. Personally, I believe the men who lose 
most are those who thus stay away. But the paradox is here; when 
cultivated people do stay away from a certain portion of the population, 
when all social advantages are persistently withheld, it may be for years, 
the result itself is pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument, 
for the continued withholding.

It is constantly said that because the masses have never had social 
advantages, they do want them, that they are heavy and dull, and that it 
will take political or philanthropic machinery to change them. This 
divides a city into rich and poor; into the favored, who express their 
sense of the social obligation by gifts of money, and into the unfavored, 
who express it by clamoring for a "share"­both of them actuated by a vague 
sense of justice. This division of the city would be more justifiable, 
however, if the people who thus isolate themselves on certain streets and 
use their social ability for each other, gained enough thereby and added 
sufficient to the sum total of social progress to

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justify the withholding of the pleasures and results of that progress from 
so many people who ought to have them. But they cannot accomplish this for 
the social spirit discharges itself in many forms, and no one form is 
adequate to its total expression.

[image caption: A HULL-HOUSE STUDIO.]



Page 371

CHAPTER XVI
ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE

THE first building erected for Hull-House contained an art gallery well 
lighted for day and evening use, and our first exhibit of loaned pictures 
was opened in June, 1891, by Mr. And Mrs. Barnett of London. It is always 
pleasant to associate their hearty sympathy with that first exhibit, and 
thus to connect it with their pioneer efforts at Toynbee Hall to secure 
for working people the opportunity to know the best art, and with their 
establishment of the first permanent art gallery in an industrial quarter. 

We took pride in the fact that our first exhibit contained some of the 
best pictures Chicago afforded, and we conscientiously insured them 
against fire and carefully guarded them by night and day. 

We had five of these exhibits during two years, after the gallery was 
completed: two of oil paintings, one of old engravings and etchings, one 
of water colors, and one of pictures especially selected for use in the 
public schools. These exhibits were surprisingly well attended and 
thousands of votes were cast for the most popular pictures. Their value to 
the neighborhood of course had to be deter-

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mined by each one of us according to the value he attached to beauty and 
the escape it offers from dreary reality into the realm of the 
imagination. Miss Starr always insisted that the arts should receive 
adequate recognition at Hull-House and urged that one must always remember 
"the hungry individual soul which without art will have passed unsolaced 
and unfed, followed by other souls who lack the impulse his should have 
given." 

The exhibits afforded pathetic evidence that the older immigrants do not 
expect the solace of art in this country; an Italian expressed great 
surprise when he found that we, although Americans, still liked pictures, 
and said quite naïvely that he didn't know that Americans cared for 
anything but dollars­that looking at pictures was something people only 
did in Italy. 

The extreme isolation of the Italian colony was demonstrated by the fact 
that he did not know that there was a public art gallery in the city nor 
any houses in which pictures were regarded as treasures. 

A Greek was much surprised to see a photograph of the Acropolis at Hull-
House because he had lived in Chicago for thirteen years and had never 
before met any Americans who knew about this foremost glory of the world. 
Before he left Greece he had imagined that Americans would be most eager 
to see pictures of Athens, and as he was a graduate of a school of 
technology, he had prepared a book of colored drawings and had made a 
collection of

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photographs which he was sure Americans would enjoy. But although from his 
fruit stand near one of the large railroad stations he had conversed with 
many Americans and had often tried to lead the conversation back to 
ancient Greece, no one had responded, and he had at last concluded that 
"the people of Chicago knew nothing of ancient times." 

The loan exhibits were continued until the Chicago Art Institute was 
opened free to the public on Sunday afternoons and parties were arranged 
at Hull-House and conducted there by a guide. In time even these parties 
were discontinued as the galleries became better known in all parts of the 
city and the Art Institute management did much to make pictures popular. 

From the first a studio was maintained at Hull-House which has developed 
through the changing years under the direction of Miss Benedict, one of 
the residents who is a member of the faculty in the Art Institute. 
Buildings on the Hull-House quadrangle furnish studios for artists who 
find something of the same spirit in the contiguous Italian colony that 
the French artist is traditionally supposed to discover in his beloved 
Latin Quarter. These artists uncover something of the picturesque in the 
foreign colonies, which they have reproduced in painting, etching, and 
lithography. They find their classes filled not only by young people 
possessing facility and sometimes talent, but also by older people to whom 
the studio affords the one

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opportunity of escape from dreariness; a widow with four children who 
supplemented a very inadequate income by teaching the piano, for six years 
never missed her weekly painting lesson because it was "her one pleasure"; 
another woman, whose youth and strength had gone into the care of an 
invalid father, poured into her afternoon in the studio once a week, all 
of the longing for self-expression which she habitually suppressed. 

Perhaps the most satisfactory results of the studio

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have been obtained through the classes of young men who are engaged in the 
commercial arts, and who are glad to have an opportunity to work out their 
own ideas. This is true of young engravers and lithographers; of the men 
who have to do with posters and illustrations in various ways. The little 
pile of stones and the lithographer's handpress in a corner of the studio 
have been used in many an experiment, as has a set of beautiful type 
loaned to Hull-House by a bibliophile. 

The work of the studio almost imperceptibly merged into the crafts and 
well within the first decade a shop was opened at Hull-House under the 
direction of several residents who were also members of the Chicago Arts 
and Crafts Society. This shop is not merely a school where people are 
taught and then sent forth to use their teaching in art according to their 
individual initiative and opportunity, but where those who have already 
been carefully trained, may express the best they can in wood or metal. 
The Settlement soon discovers how difficult it is to put a fringe of art 
on the end of a day spent in a factory. We constantly see young people 
doing overhurried work. Wrapping bars of soap in pieces of paper might at 
least give the pleasure of accuracy and repetition if it could be done at 
a normal pace, but when paid for by the piece, speed becomes the sole 
requirement and the last suggestion of human interest is taken away. In 
contrast to this the Hull-House shop

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affords many examples of the restorative power in the exercise of a 
genuine craft; a young Russian who, like too many of his countrymen, had 
made a desperate effort to fit himself for a learned profession, and who 
had almost finished his course in a night law school, used to watch 
constantly the work being done in the metal shop at Hull-House. One 
evening in a moment of sudden resolve, he took off his coat, sat down at 
one of the benches, and began to work, obviously as a very clever 
silversmith. He had long concealed his craft because he thought it would 
hurt his efforts as a lawyer and because he imagined an office more 
honorable and "more American" than a shop. As he worked on during his two 
leisure evenings each week, his entire bearing and conversation registered 
the relief of one who abandons the effort he is not fitted for and becomes 
a man on his own feet, expressing himself through a familiar and delicate 
technique. 

Miss Starr at length found herself quite impatient with her rôle of 
lecturer on the arts, while all the handicraft about her was untouched by 
beauty and did not even reflect the interest of the workman. She took a 
training in bookbinding in London under Mr. Cobden-Sanderson and 
established her bindery at Hull-House in which design and workmanship, 
beauty and thoroughness are taught to a small number of apprentices. 

From the very first winter, concerts which are

Page 377

still continued were given every Sunday afternoon in the Hull-House 
drawing-room and later, as the audiences increased, in the larger halls. 
For these we are indebted to musicians from every part of the city. Mr. 
William Tomlins early trained large choruses of adults as his assistants 
did of children, and the response to all of these showed that while the 
number of people in our vicinity caring for the best music was not large, 
they constituted a steady and appreciative group. It was in connection 
with these first choruses that a public-spirited citizen of Chicago 
offered a prize for the best labor song, competition to be open to the 
entire country. The responses to the offer literally filled three large 
barrels and speaking at least for myself as one of the bewildered judges, 
we were more disheartened by their quality than even by their overwhelming 
bulk. Apparently the workers of America are not yet ready to sing, 
although I recall a creditable chorus trained at Hull-House for a large 
meeting in sympathy with the anthracite coal strike in which the swinging 
lines 

"Who was it made the coal?
Our God as well as theirs." 
seemed to relieve the tension of the moment. Miss Eleanor Smith, the head 
of the Hull-House Music School, who had put the words to music, performed 
the same office for the "Sweatshop" of the Yiddish poet, the translation 
of which

Page 378

presents so graphically the bewilderment and tedium of the New York shop 
that it might be applied to almost any other machinery industry as the 
first verse indicates: ­ 

"The roaring of the wheels has filled my ears,
  The clashing and the clamor shut me in,
Myself, my soul, in chaos disappears,
  I cannot think or feel amid the din." 

It may be that this plaint explains the lack of labor songs in this period 
of industrial maladjustment when the worker is overmastered by his very 
tools. In addition to sharing with our neighborhood the best music we 
could procure, we have conscientiously provided careful musical 
instruction that at least a few young people might understand those old 
usages of art; that they might master its trade secrets, for after all it 
is only through a careful technique that artistic ability can express 
itself and be preserved. 

From the beginning we had classes in music, and the Hull-House Music 
School, which is housed in quarters of its own in our quieter court, was 
opened in 1893. The school is designed to give a thorough musical 
instruction to a limited number of children. From the first lessons they 
are taught to compose and to reduce to order the musical suggestions which 
may come to them, and in this wise the school has sometimes been able to 
recover the songs of the immigrants through their children. Some of these 
folk songs have

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Page 380

never been committed to paper, but have survived through the centuries 
because of a touch of undying poetry which the world has always cherished; 
as in the song of a Russian who is digging a post hole and finds his task 
dull and difficult until he strikes a stratum of red sand, which in 
addition to making digging easy, reminds him of the red hair of his 
sweetheart, and all goes merrily as the song lifts into a joyous melody. I 
recall again the almost hilarious enjoyment of the adult audience to whom 
it was sung by the children who had revived it, as well as the more sober 
appreciation of the hymns taken from the lips of the cantor, whose father 
before him had officiated in the synagogue. 

The recitals and concerts given by the school are attended by large and 
appreciative audiences. On the Sunday before Christmas the program of 
Christmas songs draws together people of the most diverging faiths. In the 
deep tones of the memorial organ erected at Hull-House, we realize that 
music is perhaps the most potent agent for making the universal appeal and 
inducing men to forget their differences. 

Some of the pupils in the music school have developed during the years 
into trained musicians and are supporting themselves in their chosen 
profession. On the other hand, we constantly see the most promising 
musical ability extinguished when the young people enter industries which 
so

Page 381

sap their vitality that they cannot carry on serious study in the scanty 
hours outside of factory work. Many cases indisputably illustrate this: a 
Bohemian girl, who, in order to earn money for pressing family needs, 
first ruined her voice in a six months' constant vaudeville engagement, 
returned to her trade working overtime in a vain effort to continue the 
vaudeville income; another young girl whom Hull-House had sent to the high 
school so long as her parents consented, because we realized that a 
beautiful voice is often unavailable through lack of the informing mind, 
later extinguished her promise in a tobacco factory; a third girl who had 
supported her little sisters since she was fourteen, eagerly used her fine 
voice for earning money at entertainments held late after her day's work, 
until exposure and fatigue ruined her health as well as a musician's 
future; a young man whose music-loving family gave him every possible 
opportunity, and who produced some charming and even joyous songs during 
the long struggle with tuberculosis which preceded his death, had made a 
brave beginning, not only as a teacher of music but as a composer. In the 
little service held at Hull-House in his memory, when the children sang 
his composition, "How Sweet is the Shepherd's Sweet Lot," it was hard to 
realize that such an interpretive pastoral could have been produced by one 
whose childhood had been passed in a crowded city quarter.

Page 382

Even that bitter experience did not prepare us for the sorrowful year when 
six promising pupils out of a class of fifteen, developed tuberculosis. It 
required but little penetration to see that during the eight years the 
class of fifteen school children had come together to the music school, 
they had approximately an even chance, but as soon as they reached the 
legal working age only a scanty moiety of those who became self-supporting 
could endure the strain of long hours and bad air. Thus the average human 
youth, "With all the sweetness of the common dawn," is flung into the 
vortex of industrial life wherein the everyday tragedy escapes us save 
when one of them becomes conspicuously unfortunate. Twice in one year we 
were compelled 

"To find the inheritance of this poor child
 His little kingdom of a forced grave."

It has been pointed out many times that Art lives by devouring her own 
offspring and the world has come to justify even that sacrifice, but we 
are unfortified and unsolaced when we see the children of Art devoured, 
not by her, but by the uncouth stranger, Modern Industry, who, needlessly 
ruthless and brutal to her own children, is quickly fatal to the offspring 
of the gentler mother. And so schools in art for those who go to work at 
the age when more fortunate young people are still sheltered and educated, 
constantly epitomize one of the haunting problems of life;

Page 383

why do we permit the waste of this most precious human faculty, this 
consummate possession of civilization? When we fail to provide the vessel 
in which it may be treasured, it runs out upon the ground and is 
irretrievably lost. 

The universal desire for the portrayal of life lying quite outside of 
personal experience evinces itself in many forms. One of the conspicuous 
features of our neighborhood, as of all industrial quarters, is the 
persistency with which the entire population attends the theater. The very 
first day I saw Halsted Street a long line of young men and boys stood 
outside the gallery entrance of the Bijou Theater, waiting for the Sunday 
matinée to begin at two o'clock, although it was only high noon. This 
waiting crowd might have

Page 384

been seen every Sunday afternoon during the twenty years which have 
elapsed since then. Our first Sunday evening in Hull-House, when a group 
of small boys sat on our piazza and told us "about things around here," 
their talk was all of the theater and of the astonishing things they had 
seen that afternoon. 

But quite as it was difficult to discover the habits and purposes of this 
group of boys because they much preferred talking about the theater to 
contemplating their own lives, so it was all along the line; the young men 
told us their ambitions in the phrases of stage heroes, and the girls, so 
far as their romantic dreams could be shyly put into words, possessed no 
others but those soiled by long use in the melodrama. All of these young 
people looked upon an afternoon a week in the gallery of a Halsted Street 
theater as their one opportunity to see life. The sort of melodrama they 
see there has recently been described as "the ten commandments written in 
red fire." Certainly the villain always comes to a violent end, and the 
young and handsome hero is rewarded by marriage with a beautiful girl, 
usually the daughter of a millionaire, but after all that is not a 
portrayal of the morality of the ten commandments any more than of life 
itself. 

Nevertheless the theater, such as it was, appeared to be the one agency 
which freed the boys and girls from that destructive isolation of those 
who drag

Page 385

themselves up to maturity by themselves, and it gave them a glimpse of 
that order and beauty into which even the poorest drama endeavors to 
restore the bewildering facts of life. The most prosaic young people bear 
testimony to this overmastering desire. A striking illustration of this 
came to us during our second year's residence on Halsted Street through an 
incident in the Italian colony, where the men have always boasted that 
they were able to guard their daughters from the dangers of city life, and 
until evil Italians entered the business of the "white slave traffic," 
their boast was well founded. The first Italian girl to go astray known to 
the residents of Hull-House, was so fascinated by the stage that on her 
way home from work she always loitered outside a theater before the 
enticing posters. Three months after her elopement with an actor, her 
distracted mother received a picture of her dressed in the men's clothes 
in which she appeared in vaudeville. Her family mourned her as dead and 
her name was never mentioned among them nor in the entire colony. In 
further illustration of an overmastering desire to see life as portrayed 
on the stage are two young girls whose sober parents did not approve of 
the theater and would allow no money for such foolish purposes. In sheer 
desperation the sisters evolved a plot that one of them would feign a 
toothache, and while she was having her tooth pulled by a neighboring 
dentist the other would steal the gold crowns from his

Page 386

table, and with the money thus procured they could attend the vaudeville 
theater every night on their way home from work. Apparently the pain and 
wrongdoing did not weigh for a moment against the anticipated pleasure. 
The plan was carried out to the point of selling the gold crowns to a 
pawnbroker when the disappointed girls were arrested. 

All this effort to see the play took place in the years before the five-
cent theaters had become a feature of every crowded city thoroughfare and 
before their popularity had induced the attendance of two and a quarter 
million people in the United States every twenty-four hours. The eagerness 
of the penniless children to get into these magic spaces is responsible 
for an entire crop of petty crimes made more easy because two children are 
admitted for one nickel at the last performance when the hour is late and 
the theater nearly deserted. The Hull-House residents were aghast at the 
early popularity of these mimic shows, and in the days before the 
inspection of films and the present regulations for the five-cent theaters 
we established at Hull-House a moving picture show. Although its success 
justified its existence, it was so obviously but one in the midst of 
hundreds that it seemed much more advisable to turn our attention to the 
improvement of all of them or rather to assist as best we could, the 
successful efforts in this direction by the Juvenile Protective 
Association.

Page 387

However, long before the five-cent theater was even heard of, we had 
accumulated much testimony as to the power of the drama, and we would have 
been dull indeed if we had not availed ourselves of the use of the play at 
Hull-House, not only as an agent of recreation and education, but as a 
vehicle of self-expression for the teeming young life all about us. 

Long before the Hull-House theater was built we had many plays, first in 
the drawing-room and later in the gymnasium. The young people's clubs 
never tired of rehearsing and preparing for these dramatic occasions, and 
we also discovered that older people were almost equally ready and 
talented. We quickly learned that no celebration at Thanksgiving was so 
popular as a graphic portrayal on the stage of the Pilgrim Fathers, and we 
were often put to it to reduce to dramatic effects the great days of 
patriotism and religion. 

At one of our early Christmas celebrations Longfellow's "Golden Legend" 
was given, the actors portraying it with the touch of the miracle play 
spirit which it reflects. I remember an old blind man, who took the part 
of a shepherd, said, at the end of the last performance, "Kind Heart," a 
name by which he always addressed me, "it seems to me that I have been 
waiting all my life to hear some of these things said. I am glad we had so 
many performances, for I think I can remember them to the end. It is 
getting hard for

Page 388

me to listen to reading, but the different voices and all made this very 
plain." Had he not perhaps made a legitimate demand upon the drama, that 
it shall express for us that which we have not been able to formulate for 
ourselves, that it shall warm us with a sense of companionship with the 
experiences of others; does not every genuine drama present our relations 
to each other and to the world in which we find ourselves in such wise as 
may fortify us to the end of the journey? 

The immigrants in the neighborhood of Hull-House have utilized our little 
stage in an endeavor to reproduce the past of their own nations through 
those immortal dramas which have escaped from the restraining bond of one 
country into the land of the universal. 

A large colony of Greeks near Hull-House, who often feel that their 
history and classic background are completely ignored by Americans, and 
that they are easily confused with the more ignorant immigrants from other 
parts of southeastern Europe, welcome an occasion to present Greek plays 
in the ancient text. With expert help in the difficulties of staging and 
rehearsing a classic play, they reproduced the Ajax of Sophocles upon the 
Hull-House stage. It was a genuine triumph to the actors who felt that 
they were "showing forth the glory of Greece" to "ignorant Americans." The 
scholar who came with a copy of Sophocles in hand and followed the play 
with

Page 389

real enjoyment, did not in the least realize that the revelation of the 
love of Greek poets was mutual between the audience and the actors. The 
Greeks have quite recently assisted an enthusiast in producing "Electra," 
while the Lithuanians, the Poles, and other Russian subjects often use the 
Hull-House stage to present plays in their own tongue, which shall at one 
and the same time keep alive their sense of participation in the great 
Russian revolution and relieve their feelings in regard to it. There is 
something still more appealing in the yearning efforts the immigrants 
sometimes make to formulate their situation in America. I recall a play 
written by an Italian playwright of our neighborhood, which depicted the 
insolent break between Americanized sons and old country parents, so 
touchingly that it moved to tears all the older Italians in the audience. 
Did the tears of each express relief in finding that others had had the 
same experience as himself, and did the knowledge free each one from a 
sense of isolation and an injured belief that his children were the worst 
of all? 

This effort to understand life through its dramatic portrayal, to see 
one's own participation intelligibly set forth, becomes difficult when one 
enters the field of social development, but even here it is not impossible 
if a Settlement group is constantly searching for new material. 

A labor story appearing in the Atlantic Monthly

Page 390

was kindly dramatized for us by the author who also superintended its 
presentation upon the Hull-House stage. The little drama presented the 
untutored effort of a trades-union man to secure for his side the beauty 
of self-sacrifice, the glamour of martyrdom, which so often seems to 
belong solely to the nonunion forces. The presentation of the play was 
attended by an audience of trades-unionists and employers and those other 
people who are supposed to make public opinion. Together they felt the 
moral beauty of the man's conclusion that "it's the side that suffers most 
that will win out in this war­the saints is the only ones that has got the 
world under their feet­we've got to do the way they done if the unions is 
to stand," so completely that it seemed quite natural that he should 
forfeit his life upon the truth of this statement. 

The dramatic arts have gradually been developed at Hull-House through 
amateur companies, one of which has held together for more than fifteen 
years. The members were originally selected from the young people who had 
evinced talent in the plays the social clubs were always giving, but the 
association now adds to itself only as a vacancy occurs. Some of them have 
developed almost a professional ability, although contrary to all 
predictions and in spite of several offers, none of them have taken to a 
stage career. They present all sorts of plays from melodrama

Page 391

and comedy to those of Shaw, Ibsen, and Galsworthy. The latter are 
surprisingly popular, perhaps because of their sincere attempt to expose 
the shams and pretenses of contemporary life and to penetrate into some of 
its perplexing social and domestic situations. Through such plays the 
stage may become a pioneer teacher of social righteousness. 

I have come to believe, however, that the stage may do more than teach, 
that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the test of 
being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will 
reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded 
like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged 
afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself. 

This function of the stage, as a reconstructing and reorganizing agent of 
accepted moral truths, came to me with overwhelming force as I listened to 
the Passion Play at Oberammergau one beautiful summer's day in 1900. The 
peasants who portrayed exactly the successive scenes of the wonderful 
Life, who used only the very words found in the accepted version of the 
Gospels, yet curiously modernized and reorientated the message. They made 
clear that the opposition to the young Teacher sprang from the merchants 
whose traffic in the temple He had disturbed and from the Pharisees who 
were dependent upon them for

Page 392

support. Their query was curiously familiar, as they demanded the 
antecedents of the Radical who dared to touch vested interests, who 
presumed to dictate the morality of trade, and who insulted the marts of 
honest merchants by calling them "a den of thieves." As the play 
developed, it became clear that this powerful opposition had friends in 
Church and State, that they controlled influences which ramified in all 
directions. They obviously believed in their statement of the case and 
their very wealth and position in the community gave their words such 
weight that finally all of their hearers were convinced that the young 
Agitator must be done away with in order that the highest interests of 
society might be conserved. These simple peasants made it clear that it 
was the money power which induced one of the Agitator's closest friends to 
betray him, and the villain of the piece, Judas himself, was only a man 
who was so dazzled by money, so under the domination of all it 
represented, that he was perpetually blind to the spiritual vision 
unrolling before him. As I sat through the long summer day, seeing the 
shadows on the beautiful mountain back of the open stage shift from one 
side to the other and finally grow long and pointed in the soft evening 
light, my mind was filled with perplexing questions. Did the dramatization 
of the life of Jesus set forth its meaning more clearly and conclusively 
than talking and preaching could

Page 393

possibly do as a shadowy following of the command "to do the will"? 

The peasant actors whom I had seen returning from mass that morning had 
prayed only to portray the life as He had lived it and, behold, out of 
their simplicity and piety arose this modern version which even Harnack 
was only then venturing to suggest to his advanced colleagues in Berlin. 
Yet the Oberammergau fold were very like thousands of immigrant men and 
women of Chicago, both in their experiences and in their familiarity with 
the hard facts of life, and throughout that day as my mind dwelt on my far-
away neighbors, I was reproached with the sense of an ungarnered harvest. 

Of course such a generally uplifted state comes only at rare moments, 
while the development of the little theater at Hull-House has not depended 
upon the moods of any one, but upon the genuine enthusiasm and sustained 
effort of a group of residents, several of them artists who have 
ungrudgingly given their time to it year after year. This group has long 
fostered junior dramatic associations, through which it seems possible to 
give a training in manners and morals more directly than through any other 
medium. They have learned to determine very cleverly the ages at which 
various types of the drama are most congruous and expressive of the 
sentiments of the little troupes, from the fairy plays such as "Snow-
White" and "Puss-in-Boots" which appeal to the youngest children, to

Page 394

the heroic plays of "William Tell," "King John," and "Wat Tyler" for the 
older lads, and to the romances and comedies which set forth in stately 
fashion the elaborated life which so many young people admire. A group of 
Jewish boys gave a dramatic version of the story of Joseph and his 
brethren and again of Queen Esther. They had almost a sense of 
proprietorship in the fine old lines and were pleased to bring from home 
bits of Talmudic lore for the stage setting. The same club of boys at one 
time will buoyantly give a roaring comedy and five years later will 
solemnly demand a drama dealing with modern industrial conditions. The 
Hull-House theater is also rented from time to time to members of the 
Young People's Socialist League who give plays both in Yiddish and English 
which reduce their propaganda to conversation. Through such humble 
experiments as the Hull-House stage, as well as through the more ambitious 
reforms which are attempted in various parts of the country, the theatre 
may at last be restored to its rightful place in the community. 

There have been times when our little stage was able to serve the théatre 
libre. A Chicago troupe, finding it difficult to break into a trust 
theater, used it one winter twice a week for the presentation of Ibsen and 
old French comedy. A visit from the Irish poet Yeats inspired us to do our 
share towards freeing the stage from its slavery to expensive scene 
setting, and a forest of stiff con-

Page 395

ventional trees against a gilt sky still remains with us as a reminder of 
an attempt not wholly unsuccessful, in this direction. 

This group of Hull-House artists have filled our little foyer with a 
series of charming playbills and by dint of painting their own scenery and 
making their own costumes have obtained beguiling results in stage 
setting. Sometimes all the artistic resources of the House unite in a 
Wagnerian combination; thus, the text of the "Troll's Holiday" was written 
by one resident, set to music by another; sung by the Music School, and 
placed upon the stage under the careful direction and training of the 
dramatic committee; and the little brown trolls could never have tumbled 
about so gracefully in their gleaming caves unless they had been taught in 
the gymnasium. 

Some such synthesis takes place every year at the Hull-House annual 
exhibition, when an effort is made to bring together in a spirit of 
holiday the nine thousand people who come to the House every week during 
duller times. Curiously enough the central feature at the annual 
exhibition seems to be the brass band of the boys' club which apparently 
dominates the situation by sheer size and noise, but perhaps their fresh 
boyish enthusiasm expresses that which the older people take more soberly. 

As the stage of our little theater had attempted to portray the heroes of 
many lands, so we planned one early spring seven years ago, to carry out a

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scheme of mural decoration upon the walls of the theater itself, which 
should portray those cosmopolitan heroes who have become great through 
identification with the common lot, in preference to the heroes of mere 
achievement. In addition to the group of artists living at Hull-House 
several others were in temporary residence, and they all threw themselves 
enthusiastically into the plan. The series began with Tolstoy plowing his 
field which was painted by an artist of the Glasgow school, and the next 
was of the young Lincoln pushing his flatboat down the Mississippi River 
at the moment he received his first impression of the "great iniquity." 
This was done by a promising young artist of Chicago, and the wall spaces 
nearest to the two selected heroes were quickly filled with their immortal 
sayings. 

A spirited discussion thereupon ensued in regard to the heroes for the two 
remaining large wall spaces, when to the surprise of all of us the group 
of twenty-five residents who had lived in unbroken harmony for more than 
ten years, suddenly broke up into cults and even camps of hero worship. 
Each cult exhibited drawings of its own hero in his most heroic moment, 
and of course each drawing received enthusiastic backing from the 
neighborhood, each according to the nationality of the hero. Thus Phidias 
standing high on his scaffold as he finished the heroic head of Athene; 
the young David dreamily playing his

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harp as he tended his father's sheep at Bethlehem; St. Francis washing the 
feet of the leper; the young slave Patrick guiding his master through the 
bogs of Ireland, which he later rid of their dangers; the poet Hans Sachs 
cobbling shoes; Jeanne d'Arc dropping her spindle in startled wonder 
before the heavenly visitants, naturally all obtained such enthusiastic 
following from our cosmopolitan neighborhood that it was certain to give 
offense if any two were selected. Then there was the cult of residents who 
wished to keep the series contemporaneous with the two heroes already 
painted, and they advocated William Morris at his loom, Walt Whitman 
tramping the open road, Pasteur in his laboratory, or Florence Nightingale 
seeking the wounded on the field of battle. But beyond the socialists, few 
of the neighbors had heard of William Morris, and the fame of Walt Whitman 
was still more apocryphal; Pasteur was considered merely a clever 
scientist without the romance which evokes popular affection and in the 
provisional drawing submitted for votes, gentle Florence Nightingale was 
said "to look more as if she were robbing the dead than succoring the 
wounded." The remark shows how high the feeling ran, and then, as 
something must be done quickly, we tried to unite upon strictly local 
heroes such as the famous fire marshal who had lived for many years in our 
neighborhood­but why prolong this description which demonstrates once

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more that art, if not always the handmaid of religion, yet insists upon 
serving those deeper sentiments for which we unexpectedly find ourselves 
ready to fight. When we were all fatigued and hopeless of compromise, we 
took refuge in a series of landscapes connected with our two heroes by a 
quotation from Wordsworth slightly distorted to meet our dire need, but 
still stating his impassioned belief in the efficacious spirit capable of 
companionship with man which resides in "particular spots." Certainly 
peace emanates

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from the particular folding of the hills in one of our treasured mural 
landscapes, yet occasionally when a guest with a bewildered air looks from 
one side of the theater to the other, we are forced to conclude that the 
connection is not convincing. 

In spite of its stormy career this attempt at mural decoration connects 
itself quite naturally with the spirit of our earlier efforts to make Hull-
House as beautiful as we could, which had in it a desire to embody in the 
outward aspect of the House something of the reminiscence and aspiration 
of the neighborhood life. 

As the House enlarged for new needs and mellowed through slow-growing 
associations, we endeavored to fashion it from without, as it were, as 
well as from within. A tiny wall fountain modeled in classic pattern, for 
us penetrates into the world of the past, but for the Italian immigrant it 
may defy distance and barriers as he dimly responds to that typical beauty 
in which Italy has ever written its message, even as classic art knew no 
region of the gods which was not also sensuous, and as the art of Dante 
mysteriously blended the material and the spiritual. 

Perhaps the early devotion of the Hull-House residents to the pre-
Raphaelites recognized that they above all English speaking poets and 
painters reveal "the sense of the expressiveness of outward things" which 
is at once the glory and the limitation of the arts.