Twenty Years at Hull House

Since Addams’s first months at Hull-House, she and the residents found it easier to communicate with those who had grown up in Old World villages and had close family ties, than with the immigrants’ children who were born in the United States. Addams tried to preserve the immigrants’ cultural traditions and values while teaching them about American society. Hull-House regularly hosted the families of their Italian and German neighbors, singing the folk songs or observing the national holidays of the respective groups. Hull-House used the assistance of more acculturated Italians and Germans to connect with these immigrant neighbors, until they felt welcome in Hull-House. These efforts to bring the immigrants’ old and new lives together and celebrating their ethnic literature and music, sometimes increased the children’s respect for their Old-World parents.

When Addams noticed that Italian mothers often lost a connection with their Americanized children, she decided that Hull-House should undertake an educational enterprise to build a bridge between the European and American experiences. After talks with Dr. John Dewey, Addams developed the Hull-House Labor Museum to interest young factory-workers in the older forms of textile manufacturing employed by their parents and grandparents in the Old World. She invited immigrants to instruct their American hosts in the traditional crafts at Hull-House, placing the older generation in a teaching role, rather than a learning role. The immigrants typically had to receive instruction from their children in the English language and American life. Addams witnessed one Italian girl, who normally did not want to be seen with her old-fashioned immigrant mother, become proud of her parent after she saw the Americans admire her mother’s spinning at Hull-House.

Other young people were faithful to their parents’ traditions, even if it meant lower wages for them at work. However, situations in which patriarchal immigrants “hold their children in a stern bondage which requires a surrender of all their wages and concedes no time or money for pleasures” (179). Some foreign-born parents found it easier to live off of their English-speaking children’s wages, but Addams discovered that this arrangement often led to the children’s juvenile delinquency. Daughters in particular were rigidly controlled; an investigation of 200 working girls found that only 5% had the use of their own wages. Four-fifths of the children at Chicago’s Juvenile Court had immigrant parents. Many of the young shoplifters were searching for Americanized clothing or playthings that they were not allowed to buy with their own wages. Some children ran away and became vulnerable to the dangers of city life. Children who took Hull-House courses tended to be more successful in bridging cultural gaps. For example, an Italian girl who took cooking lessons at school could help her entire family connect to American domestic habits. Civic instruction at school enabled children to introduce their parents to American constitutional principles, so the public schools in the neighborhood served assimilationist purposes.

Inter-ethnic prejudice was a problem on the West Side, as the children of one ethnic group would harass others, including the elderly. Often, the harassment was directed toward those who looked non-white. Addams heard about many of these instances from the Protective Association of Jewish Peddlers organized at Hull-House. Addams suggests that many of these issues might be minimized if white Americans faced their own problems with race. In service of that goal, Addams attended various conferences for “the advancement of colored people” (183).

Hull-House’s best efforts to help Chicagoans during the winter following the World’s Fair were inadequate for the overwhelming need. She felt ashamed of being comfortable while others faced desperate, at times fatal, privation. That winter she felt that her educational and philanthropic activities were superficial and worthless. She had an impression that Hull-House was merely pretense if the middle-class residents did not also share their neighbors’ lot of exhausting manual labor and scant food. Addams’s experiences left her in the same state of mind she felt after reading Tolstoy’s What to Do? (1887), about his futile attempts to relieve the poor in Moscow during the winter of 1881, when he became convinced that only he who shares his food and lodgings with the needy can claim to have helped them. Addams had read all of Tolstoy’s books since encountering My Religion (1884) after college. She wanted to know if his resolution to do his share of physical labor had brought him peace. Addams became ill with typhoid fever in autumn 1895. Since her health was still not fully recovered, she went to Europe in May 1896 with her friend, Mary Rozet Smith. Addams hoped to visit Tolstoy in Russia because he exemplified a man who had translated theory into action and lived according to his conscience.

Addams first visited England, where she encountered many social reformers, including members of the new London County Council, Labour Party leader Keir Hardie, Octavia Hill, and Canon Ingram of the Oxford Settlement House. Addams also met with men and women, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who approached social problems from an economics perspective. Addams was impressed by the English research, scholarship, and organized public spirit at this time, which markedly contrasted with her subsequent visit to England in 1900, when the nation enthusiastically focused on the South African War and disregarded the injustices in London.

Addams had letters of introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Aylmer Maude, who later translated Tolstoy’s Resurrection and other works. The Maudes were planning to establish an agricultural colony in England where they would support themselves by their own labor. Mr. Maude offered to introduce Addams and her friend to Count Tolstoy at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana. When Addams met Tolstoy, who was clad in peasant garb, she was disconcerted when he criticized the amount of material used for her dress sleeves. She tried to explain that the Chicago working girls wore larger sleeves and that nothing would separate her more from the Chicago people than to dress like Tolstoy. Tolstoy also criticized her for being an absentee landlord living in Chicago and receiving supplies from her farm, instead of tilling her own soil. Addams’s discomfort increased when Tolstoy’s daughter returned from the harvest field; she and her father ate the simple porridge and black bread of the peasants, instead of the elaborate food eaten by the guests. Visitors from around the world arrived daily to see Tolstoy. Most excused themselves from manual labor on the theory they were performing other tasks more valuable for society. However, Tolstoy had reason enough to excuse himself on the basis of his intellectual activity and his aristocratic status, but he was eager to labor in the field. Although Addams greatly admired Tolstoy, she wondered if he was “more logical than life warrants? Could the wrongs of life be reduced to the terms of unrequited labor and all made right if each person performed the amount necessary to satisfy his own wants?” (195). Traveling through Germany afterwards, Addams made a curious link between Tolstoy’s bread labor and Martin Luther’s comfort in harvest fields. In response, Addams vowed to bake bread for two hours each day at Hull-House. When she returned to Chicago, she realized the absurdity of the scheme: were “the actual and pressing human wants” of people waiting “to be pushed aside […] while I saved my soul by two hours’ work at baking bread?” (197).

Other reformist groups founded Tolstoyan colonies. Addams and Smith visited one of these, the Commonwealth colony, in the American South. The project had failed, but Addams admired their attempt to translate their convictions into a way of life. Tolstoy broke his own vow to write no more novels in order to publish Resurrection to help fund the emigration of a persecuted pacifist Christian group from Russia to Canada. Addams mentions that part of these leftover funds was donated to Hull-House for the relief of the neediest.

Initially, the Hull-House neighborhood had an inadequate system of garbage collection, marked by huge, wooden garbage boxes on the street pavement. These boxes overflowed with trash, including decayed produce discarded by peddlers and filthy rages discarded by rag pickers. The stench and propensity for disease in this unsanitary system motivated Addams and the Hull-House residents to investigate the city garbage collection and its possible link to the high death rate in the West Side immigrant neighborhood. The Hull-House Woman’s Club aided this investigation by taking time after their domestic chores to examine the conditions of alleys and garbage boxes. Hull-House sent substantiated reports of 1,037 violations of the law during two summer months to the health department. However, despite the reports’ veracity, there was little improvement of conditions.

In desperation, Addams, with the backing of two businessmen, bid for the city contract for garbage removal in Chicago’s 19th ward. Her bid was thrown out on a technicality, but the mayor appointed her garbage inspector of the ward, which irritated the politicians who often used this position to reward supporters. Addams’s work included supervising loaded wagons driven to the dump, prosecuting landlords who did not provide proper garbage receptacles, and discovering that one contractor was actually the largest stockholder in the soap factory that bought the dead animals cleared from the street. Addams recalls that many of the foreign-born women in the ward were shocked by her assumption of a traditionally male role. She had to explain to them 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’” (204). Addams’s even-handed enforcement of the law for all citizens irrespective of their clout was more valuable to the neighborhood than a civics lecture. The death rate in the ward dropped from third place to seventh place in the city’s list of wards. The popularity of the new cleanliness and regulations, however, threatened the powerful, corrupt alderman. He then combined the offices of garbage inspector and street repairer; only men were permitted to take the examination for this position, which disqualified Addams.

The neighborhood’s terrible housing conditions provoked a Hull-House resident’s public speech on housing reform, which resulted in one absentee landlord’s donation of the tract’s free-lease to Hull-House. Eventually that lot was transformed into a public playground managed by Hull-House, until it was turned over to the City Playground Commission. Visiting reformers from England thought that Chicago lacked a political machinery adapted to modern urban life. Immigrants tried to engage in traditional activities such as slaughtering sheep in the woefully crowded tenements. After a careful study by a Hull-House resident, the City Homes Association enacted a model tenement-house code. The congested housing led to many other difficulties, including a typhoid fever epidemic, in which the ward (containing 1/36th of the city’s population) had one-sixth of the city’s deaths. Dr. Alice Hamilton, a Hull-House resident, collected information about the relation of typhoid cases to the various plumbing systems. Her investigation led to the discharge of about half of the Sanitary Bureau employees and Hull-House’s realization of the illegal financial practices in city hall. Misunderstandings about reform efforts often brought Hull-House into conflict with their neighbors, such as their attempt to prohibit druggists’ profitable sale of cocaine to minors. Other investigations, such as the intensive study of truancy by Hull-House resident Mrs. Britton, who was in charge of the Settlement’s children’s clubs, led to cooperation.

Addams increasingly found that the Hull-House investigations achieved the best results when their research was combined with that of other public organizations or with the state. When all of the Chicago Settlements were concerned about newsboys’ conditions because they were classified as merchants instead of employees and, therefore, not protected by the Illinois child labor law, the Settlements united in the investigation of 1,000 newsboys. When no aldermen would introduce a new ordinance to protect newsboys, Hull-House was able to successfully lobby for it at the annual meeting of the National Child Labor Committee in 1908. Addams notes that this meeting “demonstrated that local measures can sometimes be urged most effectively when joined to the efforts of a national body” (214).

One of the first lessons that Addams learned at Hull-House was that private philanthropy was inadequate to deal with vast numbers of the city’s poor. During the smallpox epidemic after the World’s Fair, one of the Hull-House residents, Mrs. Kelley, a State Factory Inspector, had to find and destroy clothing being finished in houses which contained unreported smallpox cases. Another resident, Lathrop, was a State Board of Charities member who had to go back and forth to the crowded “pest house” (a hospital for those with smallpox). The Board of Health smallpox inspectors changed their clothes at Hull-House before they went home to avoid exposing their families. Addams realized that as public officials, all of these people accepted the dangerous tasks for which private philanthropy was unsuited, “as if the commonalty of compassion represented by the State was more comprehending than that of any individual group” (220). The governor had appointed Lathrop to the Illinois State Board of Charities in 1893. Her valuable contribution to the reorganization and enlargement of the state’s charitable institutions evolved from her long residence among the poor in the Settlement House and her intimate knowledge of the beneficiaries of the charity.

Hull-House was always ready to hand over its activities to whichever organization would properly continue them. Starr’s collection of photographed art was loaned to public schools after it was used for students at Hull-House; it became the nucleus of the Public School Art Society. In the earliest years, Hull-House maintained three bathtubs in its basement for neighborhood use. These provided evidence of the immigrants’ desire for a public bathhouse, which was eventually erected by Chicago’s Board of Health.

Attempts at civic cooperation, such as the paving of a street or the closing of a gambling house, connected Hull-House with its neighbors. With the Hull-House Men’s Club, established in 1893, Addams campaigned against the re-election of a notoriously corrupt alderman in the ward. Addams soon discovered that many of the neighbors’ jobs were dependent upon the alderman’s good will and that he was backed by a powerful combination of banks and newspapers, which attacked Hull-House with critical articles.

Addams felt that the most valuable function a Settlement performs is to “discern and bring to local consciousness neighborhood needs which are common needs, and […] give vigorous help to the municipal measures through which such needs shall be met” (225). The most striking need for civic cooperation was the organized effort to protect youth from the city’s dangers. Mrs. Stevens, a Hull-House resident, held a semi-official role in the nearest police station and was given charge of every child under arrest for a petty offense. Stevens then became the first probation officer of the Cook County Juvenile Court when it was established in 1899. Stevens had worked in a New England cotton mill at the age of 13; she drew on her life experiences to work wisely with wayward children. Eventually, the Juvenile Protection Association, which met weekly at Hull-House, was formed to deal with conditions that led to the alarming amount of juvenile crime. After prosecutions, as well as amiable interviews, the Juvenile Protection Association persuaded businesses to not sell indecent postcards, liquor, or tobacco to minors.

Addams served on the Chicago Board of Education in 1905, hoping to help solve the problem of juvenile delinquency through the public school system. Her experience on the Board illustrated the difficulties of democratic government because the superintendent was in a conflict with the Teachers’ Federation, each side refusing to compromise. Another obstacle was the newspapers’ distortion of discussions related to political and social reform.

During the efforts in Chicago to secure the municipal franchise for women, Addams acted as chairman of the federation of women’s organizations. She was impressed that women’s organizations representing a variety of traditions supported this issue because women needed the vote in order to establish their own institutions.