Twenty Years at Hull House

Addams begins this book with some of her childhood impressions on the theory that a person’s later inclinations may be linked to childhood experiences. She focuses on memories connected with her father because he was the dominant influence in her early life, and that relationship first led her into moral concerns. Addams often discussed spiritual topics with her father. As a child, she experienced a sleepless night if she ever told a lie and would go to her father’s room to make a full confession before she could have a comfortable rest. Before she was seven years old, she visited a neighboring town with her father and first saw poverty. Addams asked her father why these impoverished people lived in awful, little houses close together. After her father’s response, Addams declared that when she became an adult she would own a large house, but not next to the other large houses; instead, it would be located in the midst of a neighborhood of awful, little houses like these. In childhood, Addams had an “excessive sense of responsibility” (22) that manifested itself in a nightly dream. She dreamt that everyone had died in the world except for herself. She had the responsibility of manufacturing a wagon wheel; without this wheel the world’s affairs could not start again. She stood in the village blacksmith shop, but never knew how to make this wheel. When six-year-old Addams awakened from the dream, she would go to the real village blacksmith and watch how he made wheels, but she never felt adequate to the task. Addams attributes her dream to a mixture of the story of Robinson Crusoe and the end-of-the world predictions of Second Adventists, some of whom resided in her village.

Addams so admired her father, who taught a large Bible class in church, that when visitors came to their Union Sunday School, she deliberately walked next to her uncle instead of her father. Addams imagined that these strangers admired her dignified father, so Addams “prayed with all my heart that the ugly, pigeon-toed little girl, whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held very much upon one side, would never be pointed out to these visitors as the daughter of this fine man” (23). Since Addams’s mother had died when the author was a baby, Addams believed that she centered upon her father “all that careful imitation which a little girl ordinarily gives to her mother’s ways and habits” (25). Knowing that her father, a self-made man, had been a miller’s apprentice in his early life, the young Addams tried to imitate him by flattening her thumb and creating marks on the backs of her hands like a miller, rising at 3 o’clock in the morning, and reading books in the home library.

Addams’s father was a Hicksite Quaker. He emphasized self-honesty and mental integrity when Addams was confronted by someone’s account of predetermination or was pressured by evangelists at her boarding school. Once, when eight-year-old Addams wore a luxurious new cloak, her father advised his daughter to wear her old, warm cloak so as not to make the other little girls in Sunday School feel unhappy. Addams then asked how to correct human inequalities. Her father suggested that people might become equal in important areas such as education and religion. At the age of 15, Addams witnessed the death of her old nurse Polly, which made her reflect on dying in a discussion with her father. Before Addams was 12 years old, she found her father solemnly reading a newspaper article about Joseph Mazzini’s death. She learned from her parent that although people may “differ in nationality, language, and creed” (32), they can still share a bond of idealistic goals.

American children born around the time of the Civil War have recollections very different from those who were born later. Addams was four and a half years old when President Lincoln died. That day she found American flags bordered with black on her home’s two gateposts. When she asked her father about the flags, she was astonished to find him in tears. She had assumed that adults never cried. Her father told her that the world’s greatest man had died. This event initiated her into the important interests of the world outside of her home. An engraved roster of names, “Addams’s Guard,” hung in her family’s living room, which showed the local heroes who had died in the Civil War and those who had come back from the war. People who lived on nearby farms who had lost sons in the war, including one elderly couple whose five sons had enlisted. Of the couple’s sons, only the youngest had returned alive but shortly afterwards he was killed in a hunting accident. Addams reflects that it was perhaps good that life gave her an early hint of the mysterious injustices that all humans have to bear.

When Addams’s father took her on a childhood visit to the Wisconsin state capitol to see Old Abe, an eagle who had been carried by the Eighth Wisconsin Regiment throughout the war, Addams stood under the capitol dome and understood “the notion of the martyred President as the standard bearer to the conscience of his countrymen, as the eagle had been the ensign of courage to the soldiers of the Wisconsin regiment” (37). Thousands of children in that era were inspired by heroism when they learned about the bravery of soldiers who died so that slaves could be free. Addams’s father had served in the Illinois state senate from 1854 to 1870. She overheard a conversation about the early days when it was uncertain whether the Union men in the legislature would have enough votes to prevent Illinois from seceding. One day, she asked her father to read one of the letters that Abraham Lincoln had written to him. Addams’s father had known Lincoln in his earlier, more obscure years. Lincoln wrote that he understood that Addams’s father would always vote according to his conscience. Pictures of Lincoln hung in Addams’s family home, and she tends to associate Lincoln with her father. When her father died in 1881, an old political friend who was a Chicago newspaper editor wrote that Addams’s father had been the only member of the Illinois legislature who had never been offered a bribe because dishonest men feared him. Addams recalled this statement about her father when she was offered a bribe (in the form of a large charitable donation) later at Hull-House by businessmen who wanted Hull-House to relinquish its efforts to secure the passage of legislation against sweatshops. Of course, Addams turned the bribe down, but she felt ashamed that the men proposed it to her.

Another of her father’s friends, Lyman Trumbull, had emphasized that his friend, President Lincoln, had understood the greatness of the common people. When Addams was 15 years old, an incident impressed upon her the idea that “the people themselves were the great resource of the country” (41). At an annual meeting of the old settlers of their Illinois county, her father had told the story of his effort to overcome the prejudice of farmers who doubted the value of investing in the efforts in order to connect their county with the Great Lakes at Chicago. Only one woman who agreed to risk it persuaded the farmers. Addams’s father presented the now-elderly woman on the platform and honored her heroic fortitude, which helped develop the country.

Later, when Addams spent time at Oxford University learning about the English Settlement movement, she felt uncomfortable about trying to synthesize that version of social outreach with the very different American democratic society. An Oxford scholar’s statement about President Lincoln helped her as she realized anew that Lincoln had made clear “that democratic government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world” (45).

At 17, Addams entered Rockford Seminary, which her three older sisters had already attended and where her father was a trustee. Addams had wanted to go east to attend Smith College instead, but her father’s belief regarding his daughters’ education was that they should go to a school near the family home and afterwards travel to Europe in lieu of attending an eastern college. Rockford Seminary was one of the Mississippi Valley’s earliest institutions for women’s higher education. Known as the “Mount Holyoke of the West,” Rockford had almost as high a proportion of alumnae missionaries as that of Mount Holyoke. Rockford’s academic atmosphere was intense and required Addams to work diligently at her studies. Addams’s genuine interest was history, partly because her father had encouraged her history reading as a child, paying her a few cents to read Plutarch’s Lives or Irving’s Life of George Washington. Several girls in Addams’s cohort later became missionaries to Asian countries.

During Addams’s four years at the school, she faced pressure to convert to evangelical Protestantism. However, she maintained her distance from these influences, partly because her father was not a church member and she greatly admired his honorable morality, and partly because she and her fellow students emphasized rationalism, after reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work.  The only spirituality Addams experienced was translating the Greek New Testament every Sunday morning with her Greek teacher; they read from the Gospels but did not discuss doctrine. One day after she left college, a Christian professor, her Greek teacher’s brother, visited her on “one of the black days” (52), which followed the death of her father. Addams received comfort from their discussion of the universality of sorrow and his gift book, Plato’s Crito.

Addams and the other students were enthusiastic about the opportunity for Rockford Seminary to become Rockford College in the new movement for women’s full college education. Addams and another girl decided to take advanced mathematics from a pioneering female doctoral student who was temporarily teaching at Rockford, in order for the girls to be ready to receive bachelor’s degrees when the school secured a charter to confer degrees. Addams’s companion later worked arduously for women’s right to vote, which all the students believed was a good cause; Addams had followed her father’s strong support for this cause. Trying to place a woman’s school on an equal level with the state’s other male-only colleges, the Rockford students applied to compete in the Illinois intercollegiate oratorical contest. Addams was selected as the orator to not only represent her school, but the cause of college women. Addams won fifth place in the contest, having to compete with William Jennings Bryan’s oratorical skill and moral earnestness (which she had mistakenly assumed was unique to female orators). Addams was most interested in visiting the innovative School for the Deaf and Dumb in the town where the speech contest was held.

In her senior school year, Addams experienced more evangelical pressure but felt that her practice of maintaining her individual conviction was the best moral training she received at Rockford. Her moral conviction prepared Addams to resist later attempts by propagandists of diverse social theories, including socialism, at Hull-House to convert her to their dogma. At the end of her school career, Addams decided to study medicine and live with the poor. She was drawn to the scientific field, influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, but discovered that she did not have the aptitude to be a scientist. However, she eventually gave $1,000 of her inheritance for the purchase of scientific books by Rockford library. One year after she left Rockford, she returned with her classmate to receive bachelor’s degrees on the day the seminary became a college. Between the summer of 1881, after she left Rockford, until autumn 1889 when Hull-House opened, Addams was unable to translate her convictions into a plan of action. Addams knew only that she wanted to be in “a really living world,” not just “a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic reflection of it” (59).

The winter following her departure from Rockford, Addams attended the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia; however, the exacerbation of her childhood spinal problem forced her into the hospital. The next winter, Addams was bedridden at her sister’s house for six months. Although she had passed her first year’s required exams, Addams was relieved to have the physician tell her to temporarily give up medical study and spend the next two years in Europe, where she discovered other reasons for living among the poor than to practice medicine.

After arriving in England in November 1883, Addams “received an ineradicable impression of the wretchedness of East London” (61). A city missionary took a small group of tourists to see the Saturday night auction of cheap, decaying produce that a crowd of raggedly clad people were bidding for with small change. Addams was horrified by the sight of countless, empty hands clutching for food that was already inedible. Her painful reaction on the scene was increased by her memory of Thomas De Quincey’s “The Vision of Sudden Death.” De Quincey had been suddenly forced to make a quick life-or-death decision, but he had only been able to recite a line of literature. After Addams’s distress about the witnessed poverty, she began to feel a sense of misdirected energy. She believed that the pursuit of culture and education would not bring relief, but rather obscure the vital situation before her eyes. Addams recalled a mother touring Europe, happy that her pampered daughter had the opportunity to devote hours to her musical education, while the untalented daughter envied her mother’s useful industry in an earlier era. Addams felt a moral revulsion against her pursuit of culture in Europe, when she saw women laboring in cruel conditions while she attended the opera and art galleries.

In America, Addams spent a few months every winter in Baltimore where she experienced the depths of her nervous depression, despite attending fascinating lectures and a course of reading on the United Italy movement. Her summers were spent at the Illinois family home. Without any external pressure, Addams decided to receive baptism and become a member of the Presbyterian church in her village. She felt convinced that she could not depend on only herself to be good but needed the universe’s help. She longed for an outward symbol of fellowship and felt no change from her childhood acceptance of the Gospels’ teachings. Addams linked her growing devotion to the ideals of democracy with Christianity’s faith of the fishermen.

In early 1887, Addams was in Rome, Italy, planning to study the Catacombs, but she had a severe attack of sciatic rheumatism, which again made her an invalid. Later, during her first winter in Chicago, Addams gave lectures on early Christianity in the Catacombs of Rome at the Deaconess’ Training School, but some older trustees objected to her because no religious instruction was given at Hull-House. Addams had hoped that those of different religious beliefs would unite in fellowship at Hull-House.

Before Addams made her second trip to Europe, she had started to imagine a plan of renting a house in a needy Chicago neighborhood where educated young women could learn from life itself. She did not mention this idea to anyone until April 1888, after her revulsion at a Madrid bullfight stirred her conscience. She realized that she had been deferring her purpose with continued travel. When Addams shared her plan with Starr, her old school-friend, Starr, encouraged her to follow through with her plan. Addams journeyed to Toynbee Hall and the People’s Palace in England to get suggestions, confident that she was no longer just passively preparing for life, but finally escaping what Tolstoy called “the snare of preparation” (74).