Twenty Years at Hull House; with autobiographical notes

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Twenty Years At Hull House

by Jane Addams

May, 1998 [Etext #1325]

Project Gutenberg Etext of 20 Years At Hull House by Jane Addams

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deHTML from allhull.htm 1998 Apr 10 For Project Gutenberg, along with some anonymous volunteers.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This book has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at the

Celebration of Women Writers through the combined work of: Adrienne

Fermoyle, Andrea Jeddi, David Cheezem, Diana Camden, Flo Carriere, Jill

Thoren, Judi Oswalt, Margaret Sylvia, Samantha M. Constant, Terri Perkins,

and Mary Mark Ockerbloom.

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deHTML from allhull.htm 1998 Apr 10 For Project Gutenberg

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

BY JANE ADDAMS

HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO

AUTHOR OF DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS, NEWER IDEALS OF PEACE, THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE CITY STREETS, ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY NORAH HAMILTON

HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO

TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

PREFACE

CONTENTS

Preface vii

I. EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS 1

II. INFLUENCE OF LINCOLN 23

III. BOARDING-SCHOOL IDEALS 43

IV. THE SNARE OF PREPARATION 65

V. FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE 89

VI. THE SUBJECTIVE NECESSITY FOR SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS 113

VII. SOME EARLY UNDERTAKINGS AT HULL-HOUSE 129

VIII. PROBLEMS OF POVERTY 154

IX. A DECADE OF ECONOMIC DISCUSSION 177

X. PIONEER LABOR LEGISLATION IN ILLINOIS 198

XI. IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR CHILDREN 231

XII. TOLSTOYISM 259

XIII. PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS 281

XIV. CIVIC COOPERATION 310

XV. THE VALUE OF SOCIAL CLUBS 342

XVI. ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE 371

XVII. ECHOES OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 400

XVIII. SOCIALIZED EDUCATION 427

PLATES

Jane Addams, from a photograph taken in 1899 Frontispiece

John H. Addams, from a photograph taken in 1880 22

Ellen Gates Starr, from a photograph taken in 1906 64

A Hull-House Interior 88

A View from a Hull-House Window 112

A Spent Old Man 154

Sweatshop Workers 198

Chicago River at Halsted Street 258

Polk Street opposite Hull-House 280

Julia C. Lathrop 310

A Studio in Hull-House Court 370

A View between Hull-House Gymnasium and Theater 426

ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

Birthplace, Jane Addams, Cedarville, Illinois 4

Jane Addams, aged Seven, from a Photograph of 1867 7

Mill at Cedarville, Illinois 10

Stream at Cedarville, Illinois 22

Old Abe 42

Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois 44

Porto del Popolo, Rome 76

View of St. Peter's 88

Polk Street opposite Hull-House 95

South Halsted Street opposite Hull-House 96

Consulting the Hull-House Bulletin Board, from a Photograph by

Lewis W. Hine 104

A Boy's Club Member 105

An Italian Woman with Grandchild 111

Portrait, Jane Addams, from a Charcoal Drawing by Alice Kellogg

Tyler of 1892 114

Main Entrance to Hull-House 128

Head of Slavic Woman 134

Head of Italian Woman 135

A Doorway in Hull-House Court 149

Woman and Child in Hull-House Reception Room 154

In a Tenement House, Sick Mother and Children 164

A Row of Nursery Babies 168

A Neighborhood Alley 181

Hull-House on Halsted Street, Apartment House in Foreground 197

An Italian Sweatshop Worker 208

Out of Work, from a Drawing by Alice Kellogg Tyler 220

Head of Immigrant Woman 226

Aniello 235

Irish Spinner in the Hull-House Labor Museum 238

Scandinavian Weaver in the Hull-House Labor Museum 239

Italian Spinner in the Hull-House Labor Museum 241

An Italian Grocery opposite Hull-House 258

Sketches of Tolstoy Mowing 271

Head of Russian Immigrant 275

Rear Tenement in Hull-House Neighborhood 282

An Alley near Hull-House 293

A View from Hull-House Window 314

Alley between Hull-House Buildings 321

A Window in the Hull-House Library 346

An Italian Mother and Child 354

Facade of Bowen Hall 363

A Club Child listening to a Story 367

In the Hull-House Studio, from a Photograph by Lewis W. Hine 374

Exterior Hull-House Music School 379

In the Hull-House Music School 383

Terrace in the Hull-House Court 398

South Halsted Street 401

Russian Immigrant on Halsted Street, from a Photograph by Lewis W. Hine 416

Entrance to Hull-House Courtyard 426

Boy at Forge, Hull-House Boy's Club, from a Photograph by Lewis W. Hine 439

Steps to Hull-House Terrace 447

Waiting in the Hull-House Hall 453

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This book has been put on-line as part of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at the

Celebration of Women Writers through the combined work of: Adrienne

Fermoyle, Andrea Jeddi, David Cheezem, Diana Camden, Flo Carriere, Jill

Thoren, Judi Oswalt, Margaret Sylvia, Samantha M. Constant, Terri Perkins,

and Mary Mark Ockerbloom.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

Preface. by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by Jane

Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. vii-ix.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

PREFACE

Every preface is, I imagine, written after the book has been completed and now that I have finished this volume I will state several difficulties which may put the reader upon his guard unless he too postpones the preface to the very last.

Many times during the writing of these reminiscences, I have become convinced that the task was undertaken all too soon. One's fiftieth year is indeed an impressive milestone at which one may well pause to take an accounting, but the people with whom I have so long journeyed have become so intimate a part of my lot that they cannot be written of either in praise or blame; the public movements and causes with which I am still identified have become so endeared, some of them through their very struggles and failures, that it is difficult to discuss them.

It has also been hard to determine what incidents and experiences should be selected for recital, and I have found that I might give an accurate report of each isolated event and yet give a totally misleading impression of the whole, solely by the selection of the incidents. For these reasons and many others I have found it difficult to make a [Page viii] faithful record of the years since the autumn of 1889 when without any preconceived social theories or economic views, I came to live in an industrial district of Chicago.

If the reader should inquire why the book was ever undertaken in the face of so many difficulties, in reply I could instance two purposes, only one of which in the language of organized charity, is worthy. Because Settlements have multiplied so easily in the United States I hoped that a simple statement of an earlier effort, including the stress and storm, might be of value in their interpretation and possibly clear them of a certain charge of superficiality. The unworthy motive was a desire to start a backfire, as it were, to extinquish two biographies of myself, one of which had been submitted to me in outline, that made life in a Settlement all too smooth and charming.

The earlier chapters present influences and personal motives with a detail which will be quite unpardonable if they fail to make clear the personality upon whom various social and industrial movements in Chicago reacted during a period of twenty years. No effort is made in the recital to separate my own history from that of Hull-House during the years in which I was launched deep into the stormy intercourse of human life for, so far as a mind is pliant under the pressure of events and experiences, it becomes hard to detach it.

It has unfortunately been necessary to abandon [Page ix] the chronological order in favor of the topical, for during the early years at Hull-House, time seemed to afford a mere framework for certain lines of activity and I have found in writing this book, that after these activities have been recorded, I can scarcely recall the scaffolding.

More than a third of the material in the book has appeared in The American Magazine, one chapter of it in McClure's Magazine, and earlier statements of the Settlement motive, published years ago, have been utilized in chronological order because it seemed impossible to reproduce their enthusiasm.

It is a matter of gratification to me that the book is illustrated from drawings made by Miss Norah Hamilton of Hull-House, and the cover designed by another resident, Mr. Frank Hazenplug. I am indebted for the making of the index and for many other services to Miss Clara Landsberg, also of Hull-House.

If the conclusions of the whole matter are similar to those I have already published at intervals during the twenty years at Hull-House, I can only make the defense that each of the earlier books was an attempt to set forth a thesis supported by experience, whereas this volume endeavors to trace the experiences through which various conclusions were forced upon me.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

Chapter I: Earliest Impressions. by Jane Addams (1860-1935)

From: Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by Jane

Addams. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 1-22.

[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE

CHAPTER I

EARLIEST IMPRESSIONS

On the theory that our genuine impulses may be connected with our childish experiences, that one's bent may be tracked back to that No-Man's Land where character is formless but nevertheless settling into definite lines of future development, I begin this record with some impressions of my childhood.

All of these are directly connected with my father, although of course I recall many experiences apart from him. I was one of the younger members of a large family and an eager participant in the village life, but because my father was so distinctly the dominant influence and because it is quite impossible to set forth all of one's early impressions, it has seemed simpler to string these first memories on that single cord. Moreover, it was this cord which not only held fast my supreme affections, but also first drew me into the moral concerns of life, and later afforded a clew there to which I somewhat wistfully clung in the intricacy of its mazes.

It must have been from a very early period that I recall horrid nights when I tossed about in my bed because I had told a lie. I was held in the grip of a miserable dread of death, a double fear, first, that I myself should die in my sins and go straight to that fiery Hell which was never mentioned at home, but which I had heard all about from other children, and, second, that my father—representing the entire adult world which I had basely deceived—should himself die before I had time to tell him. My only method of obtaining relief was to go downstairs to my father's room and make full confession. The high resolve to do this would push me out of bed and carry me down the stairs without a touch of fear. But at the foot of the stairs I would be faced by the awful necessity of passing the front door—which my father, because of his Quaker tendencies, did not lock—and of crossing the wide and black expanse of the living room in order to reach his door. I would invariably cling to the newel post while I contemplated the perils of the situation, complicated by the fact that the literal first step meant putting my bare foot upon a piece of oilcloth in front of the door, only a few inches wide, but lying straight in my path. I would finally reach my father's bedside perfectly breathless and having panted out the history of my sin, invariable received the same assurance that if he had a little girl who told lies, he was very glad that she felt too bad to go to sleep afterward. No absolution was asked for or received, but apparently the sense that the knowledge of my wickedness was shared, or an obscure understanding of the affection which underlay the grave statement, was sufficient, for I always went back to bed as bold as a lion, and slept, if not the sleep of the just, at least that of the comforted.

I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven years old, for the mill in which my father transacted his business that day was closed in 1867. The mill stood in the neighboring town adjacent to its poorest quarter. Before then I had always seen the little city of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes of a country child, and it had never occurred to me that all its streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the one which contained the glittering toyshop and the confectioner. On that day I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together, and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house, but it would not be built among the other large houses, but right in the midst of horrid little houses like those.

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's affairs which little children often exhibit because the old man clogs our earliest years, I remember in myself in a very absurd manifestation. I dreamed night after night that every one in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was all there, even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery, and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until at least one wheel should be made and something started. Every victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a fearful handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps never were the odds more heavily against a warder of the world than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in equal parts of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of whom were found in the village. The next morning would often find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly, red-shirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. Do you always have to sizzle the iron in water? I would ask, thinking how horrid it would be to do. Sure! the good-natured blacksmith would reply, that makes the iron hard. I would sigh heavily and walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of course I confided to no one, for there is something too mysterious in the burden of the winds that come from the fields of sleep to be communicated, although it is at the same time too heavy a burden to be borne alone.

My great veneration and pride in my father manifested itself in curious ways. On several Sundays, doubtless occurring in two or three different years, the Union Sunday School of the village was visited by strangers, some of those strange people who live outside a child's realm, yet constantly thrill it by their close approach. My father taught the large Bible class in the lefthand corner of the church next to the pulpit, and to my eyes at least, was a most imposing figure in his Sunday frock coat, his fine head rising high above all the others. I imagined that the strangers were filled with admiration for this dignified person, and I 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. In order to lessen the possibility of a connection being made, on these particular Sundays I did not walk beside my father, although this walk was the great event of the week, but attached myself firmly to the side of my Uncle James Addams, in the hope that I should be mistaken for his child, or at least that I should not remain so conspicuously unattached that troublesome questions might identify an Ugly Duckling with her imposing parent. My uncle, who had many children of his own, must have been mildly surprised at this unwonted attention, but he would look down kindly at me, and say, So you are going to walk with me to-day? Yes, please, Uncle James, would be my meek reply. He fortunately never explored my motives, nor do I remember that my father ever did, so that in all probability my machinations have been safe from public knowledge until this hour.

It is hard to account for the manifestations of a child's adoring affection, so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the affairs of the imagination. I simply could not endure the thought that strange people should know that my handsome father owned this homely little girl. But even in my chivalric desire to protect him from his fate, I was not quite easy in the sacrifice of my uncle, although I quieted my scruples with the reflection that the contrast was less marked and that, anyway, his own little girl was not so very pretty. I do not know that I commonly dwelt much upon my personal appearance, save as it thrust itself as an incongruity into my father's life, and in spite of unending evidence to the contrary, there were even black moments when I allowed myself to speculate as to whether he might not share the feeling. Happily, however, this specter was laid before it had time to grow into a morbid familiar by a very trifling incident. One day I met my father coming out of his bank on the main street of the neighboring city which seemed to me a veritable whirlpool of society and commerce. With a playful touch of exaggeration, he lifted his high and shining silk hat and made me an imposing bow. This distinguished public recognition, this totally unnecessary identification among a mass of strange people who couldn't possibly know unless he himself made the sign, suddenly filled me with a sense of the absurdity of the entire feeling. It may not even then have seemed as absurd as it really was, but at least it seemed enough so to collapse or to pass into the limbo of forgotten specters.

I made still other almost equally grotesque attempts to express this doglike affection. The house at the end of the village in which I was born, and which was my home until I moved to Hull-House, in my earliest childhood had opposite to it—only across the road and then across a little stretch of greensward—two mills belonging to my father; one flour mill, to which the various grains were brought by the neighboring farmers, and one sawmill, in which the logs of the native timber were sawed into lumber. The latter offered the great excitement of sitting on a log while it slowly approached the buzzing saw which was cutting it into slabs, and of getting off just in time to escape a sudden and gory death. But the flouring mill was much more beloved. It was full of dusky, floury places which we adored, of empty bins in which we might play house; it had a basement, with piles of bran and shorts which were almost as good as sand to play in, whenever the miller let us wet the edges of the pile with water brought in his sprinkling pot from the mill-race.

In addition to these fascinations was the association of the mill with my father's activities, for doubtless at that time I centered upon him all that careful imitation which a little girl ordinarily gives to her mother's ways and habits. My mother had died when I was a baby and my father's second marriage did not occur until my eighth year.

I had a consuming ambition to posses a miller's thumb, and would sit contentedly for a long time rubbing between my thumb and fingers the ground wheat as it fell from between the millstones, before it was taken up on an endless chain of mysterious little buckets to be bolted into flour. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened, as my father's had become, during his earlier years of a miller's life. Somewhat discouraged by the slow process of structural modification, I also took measures to secure on the backs of my hands the tiny purple and red spots which are always found on the hands of the miller who dresses millstones. The marks on my father's hands had grown faint, but were quite visible when looked for, and seemed to me so desirable that they must be procured at all costs. Even when playing in our house or yard, I could always tell when the millstones were being dressed, because the rumbling of the mill then stopped, and there were few pleasures I would not instantly forego, rushing at once to the mill, that I might spread out my hands near the mill-stones in the hope that the