Jane Addams and American urban reform

Revista de Estudios Norteameric a110 s, n.9 4 ( 1996), pp. 29 - 33 JANE ADDAMS AND AMERICAN URBAN REFORM ALLEN F. D AV IS Temple University Jane Addams was the most famous of a group of idealistic Americans who tried to humanize the industrial city at the tum of the century. Influenced by John Ruskin and other European writers, as well as by their own experience, they moved into workingclass neighborhoods, and from their outposts in the slums they tried to transforrn the urban landscape. They fought against child labor and tried to impro ve housing. The pionneered in establishing kindergartens and they were leaders in progressive education. They tried to ease the process of Americanization among their largely foreigh-born neighbors. The worked to improve city government, to build parks and playgrounds, and to bring a sense of community to the city. Their ultimate goal was to eliminate poverty and to promote equal opportunity. Sometimes they were naive, often they betrayed their upper-middle class background. Their crusades were at best only partly successful. Yet one hundred years later as we seem to be enveloped in another age of greed, another time of urban crisis, Jane Addams and her co-workers, and their efforts to change the urban environment, and to promote a better life for ali, seem worth recalling. Jane Addams was bom in Cedarville, a small village in north em Illinois, not far from the Wiscons in border. Her father was a wealthy and influencia! businessman, miller, farrner and politician. Despite a rather complex family and a step-mother with whom she did not get along, Jane Addams hada normal, active, rural childhood. Like a great many others ofther generation she left the small town to move to the city, but she had a warm affection for her hometown, a real sense of place, and she retumed frequently even after she became famous. Memories of her rural childhhod, and the sense of community in the small town because a reference point for evaluating and understanding the massive changes and the growth of industrial cities that took place during her lifetime. Jane Addarns was one of the first generation of college women. A few young 30 A/len F. Davi s women had attended Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, or one of a small handful of other colleges before the civil War, but they usually received the equivalent of a high school rather than a college education. It was not until the founding of Vassar in 1861, Smith in 1872, Wellesley in 1875, Bryn Mawr in 1886, and the gradual movement toward limited coeducation at Comell, Harvard anda number of state universities in the mid-West, that college education for women in the United States became a reality. JaneAddams wanted to attend Smith College, in part because it had the same high standards for admission that the best men 's colleges maintained. But, her father insisted that she stay closer to home, so in 1877 she enrolled at the Rockford Female Seminary (later Rockford College), which did not even have collegiate status when Jane Addams entered. She planned to transfer, but she stayed on to graduate in l 881. To be a college woman, whether at Vassar or Ro ckford, took sorne courage in 1877. J ust four years earlier Dr. Edward H. Clarke, a professor at Harvard Medica! School, had written a little book, Sex in Education, in which he argued that higher education for women would interfere with the reproductive system and lead to nervous prostration anda general decline ofhealth. But , Jane Addams was determined to become a college woman, and her college years were crucial to her later career. But, what did a woman college graduate do in 1881? There were very few fields open to wornen other than teaching, a career she rejected. She tried medica) school, but dropped out after a few months. She traveled in Europe. She cared for ther siste r 's children. She had bouts of illness and near nervous collapse. It took her eight years of floundering before s he found something useful to do with her lilfe. She discovered her calling on her seco nd European trip in 1888. In her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, she argues that it was ata bull fight in Madrid that she finally realized the folly of study and travel and decided to do something creative and real with her life. Her letter, however, indicates that it was more likely in London that she made her decision. She was traveling with her college friend, Ellen Starr, when s he visited Toynbee Hall , the pioneer university settlernent in the East End of London. Years later, Jane Addams in writing about the influences behind the settle ment movement always divided them into the «Subjective neccesity» and th e «objective need». By «subjective)) s he meant the need for highly educated young people like her se lf to find something meaningul to do in a world that was fast becoming divided betwe en those who worked with their hands and those who worked with their rninds. Collegeeducated women felt especially cut off and i so lated from the real world of the cities. The objective need for settlements was obvius to anyone who observed the slums ofthe great cities where millions were crowded into poor housing, where disease and death haunted the Jives of adults and children alike. During the s ummerof 18 89 Jane Addams and Ellen Starr tramped around Chicago trying to find a place to launch their shemc. They finally settled on a dilapidated mansion forrnerly owned by Charles J. Hull (thus the origin of the name Hull-House). The house was one of the few in the area to survive the fire of 1871, then Jane and Ellen discovered Jane Addams and American Urban Reform 31 it, there was a sa loon, an office, and a storage floor, with an undertaker and another saloon next door. In the beginning, they rented only a portian of the house. But, when they moved in on September 18, 1889, along with a housekeeper, whom they hired, they thought of it as a home not an institution. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr had few definite plans whe n they moved into Hull- House. They fumished the house, unpack ed the pictures they had purchased in Europe, invited their neighbors in, and began doing what they knew best-teaching, Jecturing, and explaining their art objects. They organized a readings group to discuss George Eliot's Romo /a and they set upan art exhibit. One oftheir programs at Hull-House was esoteric, romantic, even patronizing. But, the founders were flexible and willing to change. They discovered a need for child ca re so they started a kindergarten. They began classes in English, and organized clubs and social evenings for the mothers in the neighborhood. They invited labor unions to meet at the settlement, organized cooperative residence for working women, and in 1893 they started a music school. Hull-Hou se was not the first social settlement in the United States, there were at least two others that were founded earlier, but Hull-House quickly became the most famous. The fame and influence of Hull-House was directly related to the talented people attracted to the settlement. Th e Hull-House group shifted and changed over the years and the physical plant expanded, eventually growing to thirteen buildings that occupied more than a city block. There were menas well as women. Edward Burchard, a young college graduate who later became the Secretary of the National Community Center Association, was the first mal e resident; there was also George Ho oker, Director of the Chicago City Club and an expert on city planning, Francis Hackett, a writer and editor, Gerard Swope, la t er the president of General Electric, and many other including Charles Beard, the historian, and William Lyon Mackenzie King, th e future prime minist er of Canada. Others close ly associated with Hull-House as visitors, supporters, and advisers were Richard T. Ely, the economist, John Dewey, the philosopher and edu ca tional reforrner, and Henry Demarest Lloyd, the mu ckraking jo umalist. Yet, for ali the impressived m en it was the remarkable group of women who made Hull-House famous and influencial. Among the most importan! in the early years were Julia Lathrop and Florence Kelle y. Lath ro p carne from much the sa me background as Jane Addams. Her father was a s uc cessful lawyer and politician in Rockford, Illinois; her mother, a member of the first graduating cla ss at Rockford Seminary, was an early advocate of woman suffrage. She went to Rockford, as did Jane Addams, but then she transfered to Va ssar. But after college she moved home and worked for her father in his law office. She sa w Jane Addam s' appeal as a way to live up to her college ideal s. She moved to the settlement in 1890 and quickly became one of its mo st importante residents. She was a talented execu ti ve who was appointed a member of the Illinois Board of Charities in 1893. She helped to organize the first Juvenile Court and the Immigrant Protective League. In 191 2 she was appointed the first head of the Children 's Bureau in Washington. 32 A/len F. Da vis Florence Kelley, befare she carne to Hull-House, had experiences quite different from Jane Addams, Ellen Starr, and Julia Lathrop. The daughter of a congressman and judge, she grew up in an upper-class family in Philadelphia. After graduating from Comell, she applied far graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, but they re je cted her application because she was a woma n. Not to be denied she e nr o ll ed at the Un i versity of Zurich, one of the few European universities that took women far gradute study in the social sciences. In Switzerland she discovered sociali sm and married a Ru ssian physician. She translated on e of Friedrich En ge Is books into English. After she r etu med to New York, her marriage collapse d. In 1891 she moved with her t hr ee child ren to Illinois, in part because the divorce laws were more lenient than in New York. She wa s a large woman, energetic and determined. She was a important addition to the Hull - House group. There were other women as well. Mary Kenney O 'S ullivan and Alzina St evens had experience in the labor movemen t. Alice Hamilton was trained as a physician and became a pioneer in industrial medicine and the füst women professor at Harvard Medica! School. Gra ce and Edith Abbott carne from Io wa to Hu ll-House. Edith along with anot her Hull-Hou se re si dent, Sphonisba Breckinridge, beca me pioneers in the new field of social work at the Un iversity of Chicago, while Grace became director of the Immig rant Prot ec ti ve League b efare replacing Lathrop as head of the Children's Bureau. Hull- House became a training ground for the fi rst generation of professional women who moved on to the universities, govemment and municipal agencies, where they beca me writers, researchers and executives, as well as reformers determined to improve life in the cities and to so l ve the worse problems created by industrialism. Bu t, Hull-H ouse was more than a training ground; it was a stimulating place to li ve, and a place for an altemative lifestyle for a large number of single women ( anda few men). Most r es i de nt s had th ei r own rooms and a certain amount of privacy away from the turmoil of the settlement activiti es . They also ate in the commo n dining room, for Hull-House was served by c oo ks and maids. It was around the dining room table (over which Jane Addams pr esided) that the residents could talk over problems, plan refo nn campaigs, and debate social theories with the distinguis hed guests who often dropped in, not for the quality of the food, but rather for the qu ality of the conversation. Henry D emares t Lloyd once ca ll ed Hull-House, «The best Club in Ch icago». Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who later became famous for « Th e Yellow Wallpaper», and Women and Economics, was so stimulat ed by the common dinning room that she lat er suggested an ideal apa rtment hou se where the individual units would have no kitchens so women cou ld be freed of the drudgery of pr eparing meals. Hull- Hou se was an exciting place to live, but just out side th e door were all th e problems, t he dirt, disease, and despair that made the city a terrible place to live for th ose trap ped in the slurns. Nothing disturbed the settlement workers more than th e sig ht o fli ttle children, under sized and underfed, fo rced to work long hours in factories. Th e first Christmas, the Hull-House residents were sho ck ed a nd surprised when the y Jane Addams and American Urban Reform 33 tried to give candy to sorne of the neighborhood children only to have them reject it. Then they discovered that these particular children worked ten hours a day, six days a week in a candy factory. The couldn't stand the sight of candy. The Hull-House campaign against child labor began informally with a lecture, an article ora discussionn pointing out sorne of the horrors of little children being exploited by industry. The campaign from the first was led by Florence Kelley, who knew something about child labor before moving to Hull-House. She began to collect statistics and stories in the Hull-House neighborhood. The investigation became official when Governor John P. Altgeld appointed Kelley as a special investigator for the Illinois State Bureau ofLabor, assigned to study child labor in the sweatshops of Chicago. For the settlement workers, however, investigation was merely the prelude to reform. After presenting their statistics to the Illinois legislature, they conferred with a committee sent to Chicago to check on conditions, helped draft a bill to be introduced in Springfield, the state capital and then lobbied for its passage. Their statistics and energy played a major role in the passage of the Illinois Factory Act of 1893, which provided for factory inspection and prohibited the employment of children under fourteen at night, or for longer than eight hours during the day. Two years later the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional. The settlement workers leamed the hard way that they had to fight the same battle over and over again. Eventually they moved beyond the state to the national leve! and Florence Kelley, who became the director of the National Consumers' League in 1899, continued the fight for an amendment to the constitution. The amendment never passed, for abolishing child labor directly confronted sorne of the most powerful industries in the country. The fight against child labor was not entirely lost for eventually many of the statistics and the carefully drawn maps of the Hull-House neighborhood showing occupation, etnicity, and age were published in Hull-House Maps and Papers ( 1895), a pioneer study that stimulated other careful urban studies and led eventually to the development of urban sociology and a change in the laws. The Hull-House crusade against child labor also led to many other reform movement s: attempts in improve housing, to promete better education, the build parks and playgrounds, evento promete a sense of community and neighborhood in the city. A large amount ofthe Hull-House reform effort was directed at the immigrants - the Italians, Greek, Irish, Germans and East European Jews who live near the settlement. But, the Hull-House reforms were never only local. The settlement workers believed that what they Jeamed in their neighborhood could apply to the nation. They organized the Immigrant Protective League. They tried to ease the process of Americanization. Jane Addams especially tried to promete the preservation ofthe old ethnic ways, and to ease the conflict between generations. The settlement workers tried quite consciously to promete their own middle-class values. For example, they tried to teach the recent immigrants how to live in unclutter ed rooms, and to separate the functions of living into clearly defined spaces. But many of the recent immigrants were much more 34 A/len F. Da vis comfortable mixing sleeping, eating, and working in the same space. To live neat and ordered lives in overcrowded tenements was often impossible in any case. Sometimes the settlement workers in their eagnemess to wipe out child labor did not a pp recia te how much immigrant families depended on the wages of the young. And, in their appreciation ofhow devastating alcoholism could be, they failed to understand the role that beer and wine played in the social life of immigrant cultures. The Hull-House reformers had less prejudice and greater understanding of other ethnic groups than most of their generation, but they did not escape the racism of their time. Hull-House was segregated. African-Americans were not welcome. The excuse was that ifblacks carne to the settlement, they would drive out the other groups. There were few blacks in the neighborhood in the era before World War I, and Jane Addams did help to found a settlement in a predominantly black area. She also was one of the founders ofthe N.A.A.C.P. anda leader in the fight for civil rights for all. Still from the vantage point of 1996 it seems odd that an institution that promoted democray wo uld restrict their efforts to whites only, but the entire progressive rnovement, w hich the Hull-House refonners were an important part, stood for progress for whites only. JaneAddams worked hard to promote woman suffrage and women's rights. But she also argued that women had certain traditional roles, as hornemakers, breadgivers, and mothers. She seems out of step with modero feminism, but unlike sorne of the other advocates of woman suffrage who believed that immigrant and poor women should not be given the vote, Jane Addams argued that these women, more than the upperclass, had the intelligence and the experience to use their vote wisely. She argued for what she called «municipal housekeeping». In a rural society a wife and mother could prov ide pure food and milk for her family by being a good housekeeper, but in a urban age a women needed to get into politics to make sure that the municipal water system, the trash collection, the market inspections worked well enough to prevent disease from spreading to her family. By the same token Jane Addams argued that it was necessary to pass state and federal laws, to promote reform on a national. even on an international leve! in order to promote safe neighborhoods. One can argue, as several historians have, that Jane Addams and her co-workers were sentimental and impractical, that they were more interested in social control t ha n in social refonn. It is quite possible to survey the history of the past 100 years and to conclude that Hull-House and the entire Progressive-New Deal Society effort to solve the problems of urban America have failed. Chicago and other American cities still suffer from a high rate of crime, poor housing, inadequate schools, and recreational fa cilities, as well as racial and ethnic tensions that fiare into violence and gang warfare. Institutions Iike Hull-Hous e, the govemment, and other social agencies all seem to have failed to sol ve the proble ms of the truly disadvantaged in America. lfthe story of Hull-House over more than a hundred yea rs is the story of failure, it is also the story of success. Man y of the poor did find encouragement at the settlement and were able to move out of the slums, and many of the programs initiated at Hull- Jane Addams and American Urban Re fo rm 35 House helped to improve working and living conditions in Chicago and in America. Th e ultimate worth of the settlement and its attempts to <leal with the overwhelming problems of the industrial city cannot be mea sured in one neighborhood or city, for the Huul-House. In a new age of greed the successes seem more important than the failures. On the occasion of Jan eA ddams' death in 19 35, WilliamA!len White, th e editorofThe Emporia Gazette, wrote: «She, more than any other contemporary Ameri ca n, represented through her leadership what might be called the altruistic element in a civi li zation that is on the whole too acquisitive». WORKSCITED This essay is based lar ge ly on the following sources: AL LEN F. DAVIS. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement 1890-1914, Second edition with new introduction (New Brunswick; Rutgers University Pr ess, 1984 ). American Heroine: The Life and Lege nd of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). MARY LYNN MCCREE BRYAN and ALLEN F. DAVIS, ed s., 100 Years at Hull- House (Bloomingto n: Indiana University Press, 1990 ). MINA CARSON. Settlement Folk. Social Th ought and the American Settlement M ove me nt, 1885-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 ). RIVKA SHPAK LISSAK. Pluralism and Progressives: Hull-House and the New Jmm igrants, 19R0 -1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). LASCH-QUINN, ELIZABETH. Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993 ). COSTIN, LELA B. Two Sisters for Social .lustice: A Biography of Grace and Ed ith Ab bott (Urban a: University of Illinois Pr ess, 19 83). SICHERMAN, BARBAR A. Atice Hamilton: A Life in Letters (Cambridge: Harvard Univers it y Press, 1984). KISH SKLAR, KATHRYN. Fl orence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise o/Women's Politica/ Culture. JRJ0-/900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).