A Japanese Visitor at Hull-House

Every Sunday evening during the winter months, visitors jockeyed for seats in the Hull-House Auditorium. They came for the weekly Hull-House lecture at 8 p.m. They came to hear from diverse speakers, who shared knowledge and enthusiasm for a wide range of topics and used the stereopticon (an early projector) to illustrate their thoughts and ideas.

The Hull-House settlement’s winter lecture series was wildly popular, and every week many people were turned away after the auditorium filled all of its 750 seats. The lecture series was an important part of the settlement’s mission. The lectures were intended to educate, to inspire, to encourage appreciation for the arts, science, and culture, and to foster respect for new people and new ideas. The lectures were free, and working people from the Hull-House neighborhood, predominately men, made up a good share of the audience.

Hull-House Coffee House and Theatre Building, constructed in 1899. The Auditorium was located on the second floor.

On Sunday, Nov. 29, 1903, the speaker was Toyokichi Iyenaga and his topic was “Beautiful Japan.” Iyenaga was a lecturer in political science at the University of Chicago and was an expert on Japanese diplomacy.

Professor Iyenaga was born in Japan in 1862 and came to the United States to study at Oberlin College, where he won a prestigious oratorical contest and earned his degree in 1887. After he completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1890, he settled in Chicago, where he was a lecturer at the University of Chicago for nineteen years. Iyenaga distinguished himself as an orator and was a prolific, compelling, and sometimes controversial speaker. At a public lecture in Chicago in July 1903, Iyenaga raised eyebrows by arguing that American women could learn from the women of Japan, in matter of their attire, because Japanese women did not waste their time on fashion and did not, like their American counterparts, endure “the torture of high-heeled shoes or shock the sensibilities of right-minded people by wearing dead birds on her hats.”

Iyenaga was a colorful speaker. He was also, for most people, a curiosity. In 1903, there was only a small number of Japanese people living in the United States, and most of them were settled in the Pacific Northwest. American immigration policy—like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred the immigration of Chinese laborers and later the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement between Japan and the U.S. to restrict Japanese immigration—reflected prevailing racist sentiments in America against Asian peoples. As well, racist imagery of “Yellow Peril” exacerbated irrational fears that people from the East represented an existential danger to people in the West. Thus, the Japanese community in Chicago was small and remained small, growing only to about 300 in the city by the 1920s.

One of the quintessential characteristics of Jane Addams’s philosophy as a human being and as a reformer was the importance of intercultural exchange, of face-to-face interaction between people of widely diverse backgrounds, of different races and cultures, religious affiliation, and economic or social class. Critical to that philosophy in the organization and management of Hull-House was providing a forum for all people and all viewpoints. Over the years, Hull-House hosted anarchists, socialists, feminists, labor organizers, and many other people with sometimes controversial ideas and radical rhetoric. Speakers like the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin and the African-American leaders W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, who were not welcome in many venues in the segregated United States, were welcome at Hull-House.

Hull-House provided child care, pure milk, economic resources, and educational opportunities. It was a laboratory for social, political, and economic reform. It launched the careers of dozens of progressive reformers. It sheltered people and fed them. It helped poor people navigate charitable, educational, and municipal bureaucracies. It offered spaces for immigrants to celebrate their cultural traditions and to learn ways to embrace their new Americanness, too. But Hull-House also offered a venue for ideas to freely flow, and for diverse voices to speak, to be heard,  and to be respected. It was not so much brave as it was a simple imperative, a nonnegotiable truth in the world view of Jane Addams.

And so, there was Dr. Iyenaga at Hull-House on a winter night in 1903. Not a curiosity or a “Jap,” as a majority of Americans would have described him. Rather, an educated man and a talented orator with an interesting perspective to offer an audience of a mostly poor, immigrant quarter of Chicago.

The more I study Jane Addams and the activities of Hull-House, the more I appreciate the wide and beautiful network of people she cultivated and the open arms of the settlement she led. In the narrative of Hull-House, there was a never ending flow of people with breathtaking stories to tell us about the American past. Toyokichi Iyenaga is one of those stories. He is another person on my growing list of people who came into the Hull-House orbit who are worthy of at least a small spotlight of his own.

After that first Sunday lecture, Professor Iyenaga returned to Hull-House for additional lectures. He attended a teacher’s workshop in Iowa with Jane Addams in 1906, and he worked with her in the peace movement. In 1917, he and Addams attended a peace conference in New York, where he urged the United States to allow Japanese admission to citizenship and argued that “hundreds” of Japanese men in America wanted to enlist to fight Germany but were prevented from doing so. In 1921, he helped fund the attendance of Matsuyo Takaziwaa, a young Japanese woman and Wellesley College student, at the Third International Congress of Women in Vienna, at which Jane Addams presided as president.

Sometime in the 1910s, Toyokichi Iyenaga traded the University of Chicago for Columbia University and moved his wife Yui and son Katsunosuke “Kenneth” to New York. He continued his work as a professor with growing expertise in U.S.-Japanese relations and remained a popular public lecturer. He also published several books, his most prominent Japan and the California Problem, published in 1921. From the limited historical record of his life, Iyenaga’s immigrant story was a successful one. He prospered, won respect as a scholar, and raised his son, who became a small businessman. In 1922, the elder Iyenagas retired to Oneida County, New York, where they were prominent citizens and active in charitable causes. In 1936, Professor Iyenaga was ice fishing on Oneida Lake, fell through the ice, and drowned. He was seventy-four years old, and he left behind a wife, son, daughter-in-law, two young grandsons, and an impressive list of publications.

But that was not the end of his immigrant story. And, sadly, the end of that story was an ugly one, reflecting the depth of racism in the United States, and the sad truth that in some ways not much had changed since Toyokichi Iyenaga was a young professor in Chicago.

On Dec. 23, 1942, a drunk white man announced to his friends in a bar in Sylvan Beach, NY, that he could “get a couple of Japs. I’m not just talking either.”  With his .32 caliber automatic revolver, he walked a mile to the home of Kenneth Iyenaga, the late Professor Iyenaga’s 47-year-old son. The Iyenaga family, five of just 460 Japanese-Americans who lived in upstate New York in 1942, lived in a 1920s house, built from a Sears Roebuck construction kit. There was a photograph of Gen. Douglas McArthur in a front window and a portrait of George Washington hanging in the parlor. The Iyenagas were patriotic Americans. Kenneth purchased war bonds and donated an old car in a local drive for scrap metal. His wife Kei, a Japanese immigrant who graduated from Barnard College, volunteered for the American Red Cross.

The shooter who had come to murder the Iyenagas was Joe O’Toole, a 64-year-old former bartender. He came in the kitchen door with his gun and started shooting. He first hit Kei in the neck, he shot the 77-year-old widow of Professor Iyenaga in the thigh, abdomen, and shoulder, and then he shot Kenneth once in the chest. Fortunately, the Iyenaga’s elder son Yone escaped when the shooting started, and their younger son Kenneth Jr. was not at home at the time.

Kei and Yui survived their injuries, but Kenneth died that day on the kitchen floor. O’Toole confessed his crime. He was proud. “I shot the damn Japs,” he told police.

O’Toole was indicted for murder and assault, but the court excused him of responsibility. Instead, he was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He escaped justice, or perhaps he was dealt the only kind of justice a white criminal justice system in America could see. In 1943. When the country was at war with people who looked like O’Toole’s victims. O’Toole was white, so he was lucky. The Iyenaga family was brown, and not so lucky. A mother lost her only son that day, a wife became a widow, and two boys no longer had a father.

The Iyenaga family’s immigration story represented the best and worst of what America offered and denied immigrants. Jane Addams appreciated the possibilities and understood the difficulties Toyokichi Iyenaga faced in Chicago in 1903  at the time he delivered a lecture about the beauty of his native country at Hull-House. She would have been horrified by the violence his family faced, seven years after she was buried.

During World War I, Jane Addams never wavered in her commitment to peace, paying a high price in reputation and support for Hull-House. I have often wondered if she would have set aside the peace dove when the United States stood up against Hitler in World War II. But I don’t have to wonder about one thing. Based on how she maintained her respect for German people during World War I, I feel confident she would have maintained her respect for Japanese people during World War II. She understood that you could abhor a country’s militaristic behavior and not abhor that  country’s people.

I also feel confident that Jane Addams would have been a vocal opponent of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Not only because she knew Toyokichi Iyenaga, but because she understood that democracy or peace or anything that is worth holding requires an acceptance that all people are entitled to their humanity.

by Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Michael D. Albert, “Japanese,” in Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton, eds., The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 253-55; Masako Osako, “Japanese Americans: Melting into the All-American Melting Pot,” in Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones, Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 409-37; Greg Robinson, The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016),  276-77; “Japanese,” Encyclopedia of Chicago; Report of the Third International Congress of Women (Geneva: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1921), 165; 1920 U.S. Federal Census; 1940 U.S. Federal Census; Toyokichi Iyenaga Gravestone, Verona Beach Cemetery, Verona Beach, NY; Cap and Gown (University of Chicago Year Book), (1904), 25; “A Jap Carries off a Prize,” Gibson City (IL) Courier, Jan. 28, 1887, p. 2; “Finds Fault with American Women,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), July 25, 1903, p. 3; “The Jap, Toyokichi Iyenaga,” Bureau County Tribune (Princeton, IL), Aug. 11, 1905, p. 6 (image 1 of Iyenaga); “Iyenaga Tells of Women in Japan,” The Dispatch (Moline, IL), Feb. 22, 1906, p. 5;  “Good Program Is Prepared,” The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA), Oct. 5, 1906, p. 5; “Toyokichi Iyenaga, Ph.D.,” The Buffalo Sunday Morning News, Nov. 30, 1913, p. 37 (image 2 of Iyenaga); “Charges Hibben Is in Pay of Greece,” The Boston Globe, June 1, 1917, p. 10; “Toyokichi Iyenaga, Former Lecturer at U. of C., Drowns,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 30, 1936, p. 1; “Ex-Bartender Held in Killing of Jap at Rome,” Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY), Dec. 24, 1942, p. 28; “Slaying of Jap Laid to Insanity of Man Tested Here,” Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY), Mar. 17, 1943, p. 17; “Tragedy That Struck the Iyenaga Family,” Syracuse (NY) Herald American, Aug. 11, 1985; Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 429-31; Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:606 (image of auditorium); Hull-House Bulletin, 6 (Mid-Winter 1903-04), 1, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm (JAPM), 53:1170; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Jane Addams to W. E. B. Du Bois, January 26, 1907; Mabel Hyde Kittredge to Jane Addams, May 18, 1921, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

Striving for Social Justice: Jane Addams and Sophonisba Breckinridge

By Anya Jabour, Regents Professor of History, University of Montana

The subject of my new book, Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women’s Activism in Modern America, worked closely with Jane Addams for decades. The two women, along with other reformers affiliated with Hull House, championed labor legislation, provided services to immigrants, promoted woman suffrage, and advocated for world peace. Together, they were a powerful force for social justice.

Born and raised in Kentucky, Breckinridge came to Chicago to pursue higher education at the coeducational University of Chicago. After earning her M.A. (1897) and Ph.D. (1901) in political science, she graduated with her J.D. (1904) at the top of the Law School’s first graduating class.  After completing her coursework, Breckinridge taught a pioneering course on “The Legal and Economic Position of Women” that brought her into contact with the Second City’s labor organizers and social reformers.

Breckinridge’s concern about the plight of working women initiated her long association with Hull House and its head resident, Jane Addams. In 1905, at Addams’s suggestion, she accepted an appointment as Inspector of Yards, investigating the working conditions of women in Chicago’s infamous stockyard district. Breckinridge spent more than four months inspecting the facilities and interviewing the employees of “Packingtown,” mostly immigrant girls and young women between the ages of 16 and 22.  Working in cold, windowless rooms and standing on “dirty, blood-soaked, rotting wooden floors” for ten hours a day, the workers “toil[ed] without relief in a humid atmosphere heavy with the odors of rotten wood, decayed meats, stinking offal,” and human waste from the doorless privies that vented directly into the workrooms.  Breckinridge found her task exhausting, both physically and emotionally.  To Addams, she confessed, “I was getting where I could not sleep—the vision of the day’s work presses in so!  Not my own day’s work—but that of the crews of girls I see marching past me now.”

Breckinridge translated her emotional response to women workers’ abysmal working conditions into social scientific scholarship and policy recommendations. In addition to publishing her study on women workers in the stockyards, she reported her findings to the U.S. Labor Department. With the support of settlement house workers, clubwomen, and trade unionists, she helped persuade the department to provide funding for a full-scale investigation. Ultimately, the nineteen-volume report on the working conditions of wage-earning women and children, published between 1910 and 1913, provided the basis for the establishment of two new federal bureaus, the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the U.S. Women’s Bureau.  These government agencies would advocate for a ban on child labor and better working conditions for women for decades to come.

Breckinridge (right) with Julia Clifford Lathrop (left) University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-02244], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Breckinridge’s work with Addams on behalf of working women soon led to an invitation to live and work at Hull House. As Russell Ballard, one of the few male residents of Hull House, expressed it, “a brilliant company of women were drawn to the settlement to pioneer in the promotion of social change. The scholarly and talented Sophonisba Breckinridge joined the company in 1907 to become one of Miss Addams’ closest friends and most helpful associates.” Although her responsibilities at the University of Chicago prevented her from living at Hull House full-time, Breckinridge spent all of her vacation quarters—and much of her limited free time—at Hull-House, where she was listed as an official “resident” from 1907 until 1921.

Breckinridge became one of Addams’s closest colleagues. She helped to raise funds for the settlement, served as a substitute speaker when Addams was unavailable, and assisted Addams with her correspondence.  Breckinridge’s papers are filled with hastily scrawled notes from Addams, invariably beginning with the exclamatory greeting “Dear Lady!” and closing, “Hastily yours, Jane Addams.” In response to such letters, Breckinridge assisted Addams in innumerable ways, both large and small, leading Addams to close one typical letter asking Breckinridge to perform a task, “I do hope that I am not putting too many things ‘off’ on you.” Breckinridge always came through for Addams, signing one letter, “Yours to command always.”

Soon after Breckinridge took up residence at Hull House, she joined a special committee investigating the conditions confronting young single immigrant women who arrived in the city, lost and alone and vulnerable to both sexual and economic exploitation.  A typical case was that of Bozena, “a nice young Bohemian immigrant girl” who was “so eager for work . . . that she had taken the first job she could find—in a saloon.”  As fellow Hull House resident Edith Abbott, Breckinridge’s colleague at the University of Chicago, explained: “The saloonkeeper had abused her shamefully and then turned her out when he found that she was to become the mother of his illegitimate child.”

Hull House residents helped Bozena file charges, obtain childcare, learn English, gain citizenship, and find work. But Breckinridge and Addams soon realized that the problem of “lost immigrant girls”—as well as the difficulties confronting immigrant men and children—was too widespread for existing service agencies to address.  As Addams explained the problem:

Every year we have heard of girls who did not arrive when their families expected them, and although their parents frantically met one train after another, the ultimate fate of the girls could never be discovered; we have constantly seen the exploitation of the newly arrived immigrant by his shrewd countrymen in league with the unscrupulous American; from time to time we have known children detained in New York and even deported whose parents had no clear understanding of the difficulty.

With Addams’s enthusiastic support, Breckinridge proposed the creation of a new organization, and the Immigrants’ Protective League was established in 1908.  As Abbott recalled: “This problem of the unaccompanied girls proved to be challenging; but nothing that ought to be done seemed impossible to Miss Breckinridge!”

Breckinridge at Green Hall at the University of Chicago. (Courtesy of University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-02252], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.)
The Immigrants’ Protective League provided essential assistance to Chicago’s immigrants—women, men, and children. One of the League’s first major accomplishments was establishing “a kind of immigration station” to welcome new arrivals.  Immigrants who arrived in Chicago by train met with League agents—chosen to represent the nationalities and speak the languages of their clients— who helped orient newcomers to the city.  Agents provided new arrivals with information about employment opportunities, social services, and evening classes. One of the principal goals of the League was to protect immigrants from exploitation.  At the welcome station, agents helped new arrivals steer clear of unscrupulous cab drivers, fraudulent employment agents, and the ever-present “cadets” who recruited young women into prostitution.  Breckinridge also persuaded local women’s clubs to provide funds for the League to provide temporary lodging for young immigrant women.  In only four years, the League served close to 80,000 immigrants at its welcome station.

Breckinridge and Addams continued to team up to advance social reform. In 1911, they were elected vice-presidents of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Under their leadership, the Second City quickly became a “stronghold for the cause.” However, internal dissension caused both women to dread meetings of the national board, which Addams compared to being immersed in “boiling oil.”

Tensions came to a head in Fall 1912, when Breckinridge and Addams, in defiance of the suffrage organization’s traditional commitment to non-partisanship, declared their support for Progressive Party presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Addams, Breckinridge, and other activists not only convinced the third-party candidate to support woman suffrage, but also helped to shape the Progressive Party’s agenda. The third-party platform, known as the “Contract with the People,” was modeled on the “Platform of Industrial Minimums” adopted at the 1912 National Conference of Charities and Corrections, where both Breckinridge and Addams played prominent roles. The platform included demands for a “living wage,” unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation for all workers, as well as special protections for women and children in the workforce.

However, Breckinridge and Addams failed to convince NAWSA leadership that the suffrage movement should use party politics to promote either women’s rights or social welfare. Instead, president Anna Howard Shaw publicly denounced “party ties.” This uncomfortable situation led both Addams and Breckinridge to resign their posts after only a year in office.

Although they remained active in the suffrage movement, after leaving office, Breckinridge and Adams shifted their focus away from NAWSA and toward the Woman’s Peace Party, which they co-founded in 1915 in response to armed conflict in Europe—what would later become known as World War I. The Woman’s Peace Party was the first U.S. pacifist group to treat “peace as a women’s issue.” Many members believed that women had a special responsibility to protect life and thus to prevent war. The party preamble and platform called on women, as “the mother half of humanity,” to oppose the “reckless destruction” of human life resulting from warfare.  At the same time that they emphasized women’s special responsibility for peace work, feminist pacifists also demanded equal political rights for women.  Believing that women’s full participation in the political process was essential to ending global conflict, members of the Woman’s Peace Party worked for both women’s rights and world peace.

As chairperson and treasurer of the Woman’s Peace Party, respectively, Addams and Breckinridge represented the new organization at an international feminist-pacifist gathering known as the International Congress of Women and held at The Hague in 1915. The Congress enthusiastically adopted many of the measures proposed by the U.S. representatives, calling for the creation of an international peacekeeping body, national self-determination for all countries, and equal political participation for women. Following the Congress, two delegations visited political and religious leaders of both neutral and belligerent nations.  When Addams, who participated in the visits, returned home, she did so as the first president of the new International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace.

Addams, Breckinridge, and other members of the Woman’s Peace Party took the lead in attempts to find a peaceful solution to the ongoing war.  After Addams returned to the United States, she and Breckinridge worked with both male and female pacifists in Chicago and New York to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to intervene in the European conflict as a neutral intermediary. Addams hand-picked Breckinridge for a special committee assigned to consult with other pacifists within and beyond the U.S. on strategies to “make propositions to the belligerenets [sic] in the spirit of constructive internationalism.”

Throughout the war, Addams, Breckinridge, and other members of the Woman’s Peace Party pressured President Wilson to intervene in the war to produce a “negotiated peace.” Wilson had made initial overtures in this direction at the war’s outset, but his offer was rebuffed. Thereafter, Wilson adopted a pose of watchful waiting.  Although he steadfastly maintained his intention to offer mediation when the time seemed propitious, that time never arrived. However, Wilson’s willingness to meet with pacifist delegations, his cordial relationship with Addams, and his assurances that he considered the women’s proposals at The Hague “by far the best formulation” for world peace, encouraged the pacifist women to continue their efforts.

 

Addams and Breckinridge co-founded the Woman’s Peace Party, later to become the U.S. chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, in 1915. (Courtesy Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library)

Addams and Breckinridge continued their search for ways to prevent U.S. entry into the conflict, to end the war, and to prevent future wars. In the aftermath of the Lusitania episode, they urged President Wilson to steer clear of what they called “a preposterous ‘preparedness’ against hypothetical dangers” and instead to provide “the epochal service which this world crisis offers for the establishment of permanent peace”—that is, to offer his services to mediate the ongoing conflict. Subsequently, they appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee of Foreign Affairs to express their support for a House Joint Resolution proposal to establish a “Commission for Enduring Peace.”

The U.S. delegation to the International Congress of Women in 1915 on board the Noordam. Jane Addams in center behind the banner, Breckinridge is on the far right. (Courtesy Swarthmore College Peace Collection)

Despite their best efforts, American pacifists were unable either to halt the ongoing war or to prevent the United States’ entry into it.  Once hostilities ceased, Breckinridge and Addams—now part of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—sought new routes to “enduring peace.” They achieved a partial victory in the establishment of the League of Nations, which incorporated many of the principles adopted at the International Congress of Women. Although the U.S. failed to join the new organization, Addams and Breckinridge persisted in promoting their vision of a peaceful postwar world.  In 1923, they discussed submitting “our” set of principles for the American Peace Award.  The plan that Breckinridge and Addams proposed called for the United States to join the World Court and the League of Nations. They also demanded that the U.S. military refrain from defending the interests of private businesses abroad, that the U.S. end both the production and the sale of armaments, and that the U.S. cooperate with other nations in a process of universal disarmament.  Finally, they recommended “cancelling or reducing debts due to the United States” from the other Allied countries in return for an agreement to “divide the costs of commissions hitherto charged against Germany alone equally between Germany and the former allies” and offering “a long moratorium to Germany” to allow that nation “eventually to pay the balance on her reparations debt as estimated by an impartial commission of experts to be constituted for the purpose.” Addams’s and Breckinridge’s joint plan thus called for the United States to promote peace not only by agreeing to abide by arbitration in future disputes and participating in a process of universal disarmament, but also by removing the reasons for rising resentment in Germany that would soon allow Adolf Hitler to rise to power. Sadly, their plan was never implemented. Nonetheless, in the years after the Second World War, many of their ideas would be adopted by the United Nations.

Addams and Breckinridge were not always fully successful in their efforts to promote social justice, but they shared a passion for justice that allowed them to persist in the face of difficulties and setbacks. Their collaboration with one another and with fellow reformers also enabled them to meet challenges with strong resolve and good cheer. Together, Addams and Breckinridge were a powerful force for social justice.

Coda: Because Breckinridge’s own papers, while extensive, are comparatively scant for the Progressive Era, to conduct my research on these decades of her life, I relied heavily on the 82-reel microfilmed edition of the Jane Addams Papers and the accompanying “Pink Bible,” the 674-page guide to the microfilm collection, created with the guidance of Jane Addams Papers Project founder Mary Lynn Bryan. I am delighted that future researchers’ work will be facilitated by the next generation of the Jane Addams Paper Project, spearheaded by Cathy Moran Hajo, which will make the Jane Addams Papers accessible in a digital format.


Anya Jabour is Regents Professor of History at the University of Montana. Her books include Topsy-Turvy: How the Civil War Turned the World Upside Down for Southern Children and Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South

Sources:

Abbott, Edith, and Breckinridge, Sophonisba P. “Women in Industry: The Chicago Stockyards,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 19, No. 8 (October 1911), 632-654.

Addams, Jane. “Woman’s Suffrage and the Progressive Party,” Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1912, pg. 9.

Addams, Jane, Balch, Emily G., and Hamilton, Alice. Women at the Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results (New York: Macmillan Company, 1915).

Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993).

Ballard, Russell. “The Years at Hull House,” Social Service Review, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec. 1948), 432-433.

Brush, Mary Isabel. “Society Leaders Will Promote Suffrage Cause in Chicago’s Fashionable Circles: National Association to Open Branch,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 24, 1911, pg. 13.

Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, et al., eds., The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)

Buroker, Robert L. “From Voluntary Association to Welfare State: The Illinois Immigrants’ Protective League, 1908-1926,” Journal of American History, Vol. 58, No. 3 (December 1971), 643-660.

“Charity Honors for Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1912, pg. 13.

Commission for Enduring Peace: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Sixty-Fourth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 6921 and H.J. Res. 32, Statement of Miss Jane Addams and Others, January 11, 1916 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916),10-12.

“Conditions in Stockyards Described in the Neill-Reynolds Report,” Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1906, pg. 4

Costin, Lela B. “Feminism, Pacifism, Internationalism, and the 1915 International Congress of Women,” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 5, No. 3-4 (1982), 300-315.

Gonzalez, Suronda. “Complicating Citizenship: Grace Abbott and the Immigrants’ Protective League, 1908-1921,” Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 56-75.

Hull House Collection, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Jane Addams Papers, 1860-1960 (microfilm edition).

Leonard, Henry B. “The Immigrants’ Protective League of Chicago, 1908-1921,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Autumn 1973), 271-284.

“Meet of Suffrage Chiefs: Chicago Women to Attend Executive Committee Session Today: Officers Will Be Chosen: Members Enthusiastic in Praise of the Progressive Party,” Chicago Tribune, October 1, 1912, pg. 5.

Patterson, David S. The Search for a Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (New York: Routledge, 2008).

Records of the Immigrants Protective League, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Papers (microfilm), Breckinridge Family Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Sorensen, John, ed., A Sister’s Memories: The Life and Work of Grace Abbott, From the Writings of Her Sister, Edith Abbott (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

“Urge Home for Immigrants,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1911, p. 5.

Wade, Louise C. “The Heritage from Chicago’s Early Settlement Houses,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Winter 1967), 411-441.

“Warns Women of Illinois: Dr. Anna H. Shaw Advises Suffragists to Avoid Party Ties,” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1912, p. 5.

“Will Ask Parties for Living Wage,” Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1912, pg. 7.

“Woman Puts O.K. on Neill Report,” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1906, pg. 2.

 

Questions About Settlements? Ask Jane!

Hull-House-Door_UIC-JAMC Neg 557
The main entry to Hull House. (Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).

How many people today know what settlements were? If you have heard of them, they conjure up black and white, or sepia images of large buildings in urban neighborhoods, operated by earnest men and women. Or images of immigrant children in classes or urban playgrounds.

When Jane Addams founded Hull-House in 1889 the idea was a new one and part of her work was in popularizing not only the settlement, but the ideas behind it. The first settlement, and the one that inspired Addams and Ellen Gates Starr to found Hull-House was Toynbee Hall, a British settlement located in London’s East End that was founded in 1884. The first settlement in the United States was Neighborhood house, established in 1886 by Stanton Coit.

Library of Congress

The idea of the settlement was simple–to bring education and social welfare to the people who lived and worked in impoverished cities. In the United States, settlements were also known as places that helped stir the melting pot of immigration. What was unique about the settlement movement, compared with other Progressive Era charitable efforts, was that the settlement workers moved in to the slum neighborhoods they sought to help, and they sought to act as neighbors, not distant benefactors to the working poor. Addams and other settlement workers wanted to understand the lives of immigrants and the working-class not be analyzing them, but by living side-by-side and helping when they could.

In the December 5, 1905  Toledo Daily Capital, Addams’ theory was described as:

that every man is an individual and equally capable of good. The Hull House idea is to develop the individual. Miss Addams also stated that a much larger number of immigrants could be taken care of in this country and assimilated to advantage than was being done now.

When Addams lectured, she often answered questions about her work. Some questions that were reported included:

What about anarchy in the slums?

I think the cry of anarchy has been greatly exaggerated in America. There is not nearly as much of it as some people seem to think. Much of the violation of law in the slums and among the foreigners is due to ignorance of the law rather than the result of criminal intentions.

How many children are taken care of at the Hull House every day?

We have a day nursery and this takes care of an average of forty children a day.

Are there any day nurses or visitors in connection with Hull House who visit the homes of those in your district?

We never go to any house unless sent for or there is some good reason for our visit. We never make it a practice to invade the homes of the poor.

Is there any religious instruction at Hull House?

No, there are no religious exercises at Hull House on account of the different beliefs of those in the house. We have Roman and Greek Catholics and Jews in addition to other creeds and denominations.

What are the political opinions of the voters of the settlement district?

That depends entirely on which party gets hold of them first. Their political beliefs are easily subject to change. For instance the Italians formerly were almost entirely Republicans. Now, however, they are swimming over to Democracy. The Russian Jews are mostly socialists. Other nationalities have similar political principles. In Chicago there is so much intense interest in ward and city politics that national politics are entirely lost sight of in the shuffle.

Is there any drinking in the Hull House?

No, there is no drinking in Hull House, but there is a great deal of it among certain classes in the slums. Most of the Jews congregate in the shops and little stores instead of in the saloons. Formerly there was very little drunkenness among the Italians when they drank only light wines. Now they are learning to drink the American beer and whisky and drunkenness among them is on the increase.

What is being done to counteract drinking by the Hull House?

We try to counteract it mainly by means of amusements. The social feature of the saloon s what appeals to most of them and so we give Saturday evening parties, dances and socials. The saloon dance hall is one of the great pitfalls of the city and we try to oppose it in particular. We have a big coffee room but it is not a great success for the reason that only a few care for coffee in the evening.

Settlements were one solution proposed by progressive reformers to alleviate the social problems caused by increasing numbers of new immigrants and rapid urbanization. Rather than build walls to keep people out, or hem them into crowded slums, Addams and other social workers sought to learn about them, live with them, and understand their cultures; all in an effort to help them navigate American life.  She believed in treating her neighbors with respect and as intelligent and capable individuals who could contribute mightily to American society.


For more on settlement houses in Chicago, see the University of Illinois at Chicago’s photo exhibit, “Changing Neighborhoods: Photographs of Social Reform from 7 Chicago Settlement Houses.