Guest Post: Democratic Ensembles: Spoken Art and Politics at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920

By Fiona Maxwell, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Chicago.

In the Chicago settlement house movement, performance and sociability supplied a means and a metaphor for reimagining democracy as a collective project in service of the common welfare. My recently completed PhD dissertation, “Democratic Ensembles: Spoken Art and Politics at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920,” takes self-governing settlement house clubs as a case study for exploring how Progressive Era concepts of social democracy unfolded in everyday practice. The project underscores the role of artistic collaboration in envisioning and bringing about desired political futures, and it introduces a more extensive dramatis personae to the history of Progressive reform.

Although a work of history, “Democratic Ensembles” has its origins not merely in writerly imagination and archival holdings, but in the actor’s craft. I began studying at the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Illinois as a child, working my way through their performance ensembles and eventually joining the teaching staff. The Piven approach to actor training—rooted in theatre games and story theatre adaptation, and defined by values of process, improvisation, and ensemble—descends from the work of Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin at Hull-House during the 1920s and 1930s. While honing my skills as a performer and pedagogue, I kept hearing tantalizing whispers about a fabled prehistory of our approach.

When it came time to write a BA thesis as a History and Theatre major at Northwestern University, my mind immediately gravitated to Hull-House. I determined to learn as much as I could about the working-class Chicagoans who enrolled in settlement house arts education programs to further their educations, find like-minded peers, and exercise their creative imaginations. In this early stage, my research focused on the community reception of children’s dramatics at Hull-House, with the goal of tracing the social and cultural history of early, pre-Spolin theatre education while foregrounding the perspectives of youth participants. I immersed myself in the Hull-House Collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a burgeoning wealth of published and online resources, including the Jane Addams Papers Project. Wading through thousands of documents, I encountered Hull-House’s dauntless cadre of reform-minded residents, as well as countless neighbors determined to realize their individual and collective aspirations. Reluctant to return home from this time travel expedition, I realized that pursuing a PhD was in order.

My early years of graduate school at the University of Chicago coincided with an explosion of public and scholarly discourse on democracy. During the late 2010s and early 2020s, historians began to revisit late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers and theorists—particularly Jane Addams and John Dewey—with renewed appreciation for their idea that democracy could be strengthened by social interaction across political and cultural divides and by prioritizing group welfare over individual gain. I embarked on my dissertation research paying close attention to how settlement workers articulated their theory of social democracy. I discovered that the language they used to describe their political philosophy mirrored the language that is still in practice today in ensemble-based theatre—conceptual gifts from Progressive Era politics to contemporary artistic practice. Recognizing the broader political significance of the settlement story, I expanded my earlier focus on Hull-House theatre to embrace the “spoken arts”—including storytelling, group games, dramatic reading, oratory, and debate—at settlement houses across Chicago, and I moved from children to “children plus,” examining how young people refined and implemented their artistic and political agendas as they aged and tracking how children’s involvement catalyzed the participation of adult family members. I was lucky enough to discover a surfeit of underutilized materials in settlement club archives. At settlement houses across Chicago, working-class “neighbors” organized self-governing clubs that left plentiful records of their daily activities, in the form of constitutions and meeting minutes, neighborhood news and club gossip, and the occasional script, poem, joke, or lyric.[1] Piecing these fragments together recasts settlement houses, not merely as gathering places for the reform-minded middle and upper classes, but as genuinely grassroots centers of community education and local organizing.

In its current iteration, “Democratic Ensembles” investigates the ways in which settlement volunteers and participants used the spoken arts to bridge social boundaries and develop a collaborative approach to democratic participation. Generations of scholars have explored the ways in which Chicago settlement leaders codified neighborhood service into new academic and professional fields, claimed a role for women in federal policymaking, and contributed to pragmatist philosophy and democratic theory. This dissertation uncovers the full “ensemble cast” of Chicago Progressivism by introducing two previously unexamined settlement constituencies: student volunteers from local universities, who drew on their interdisciplinary training in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to facilitate settlement pedagogy; and, most significantly, the neighborhood families who embraced settlement programming and made it their own. It joins an interdisciplinary scholarly conversation concerning how political, social, and artistic speaking genres have generated theories and practices of democracy, and it applies analytical frameworks drawn from book history, rhetoric, and theatre and performance studies. Combining archival research, interdisciplinary methods, and process-oriented theatre pedagogy, this project constructs a social and political history of spoken arts education, which adds to scholarly inquiry in urban history, gender history, and the history of childhood and youth and offers an actionable model for current practice. The dissertation tells the story of enfranchisement through cultural experiences and, in doing so, contributes a new conception of the role of the spoken arts in civic life.

The story begins with early settlement house founders diagnosing the lack of communal gathering spaces in industrial Chicago as a threat to the viability of democratic self-governance. The early chapters explore how settlement workers adapted traditional forms of domestic sociability and artistry to create a new piece of social infrastructure that invited equal participation from men, women, and children of all classes and cultural backgrounds. To explain how and why the spoken arts achieved such primacy in settlement programming, I analyze the formative experiences of a key yet previously unexamined subset of volunteer club and class leaders: students and graduates of Northwestern University’s Cumnock School of Oratory, who organized settlement programs with a conviction that through performance and pedagogy, they could speak a more inclusive and collaborative public sphere into being.[2]

The remaining chapters conduct an in-depth analysis of on-the-ground settlement programming, tracking the transition from arts education to political organizing from the perspectives of school-aged children, working young people, and whole families. The ability of working-class, immigrant, and Black schoolgirls and boys to engage in collective deliberation and semi-autonomous artistic production inspired settlement workers to theorize children’s club work as an apprenticeship for civic engagement. Working adolescents and young adults, meanwhile, utilized their skills in persuasive speech and organizational leadership to assert their voices in settlement administration and local reform. Experience with shared governance and extensive training in verbal expression enabled young people to transition from planning parties and staging plays to mobilizing in service of political change.[3] The participation of adult family members solidified the civic influence of the settlement project. When settlements inaugurated all-ages, mixed-gender governing bodies, fathers and sons were compelled to recognize their wives, sisters, and daughters as effective public actors. With the advent of municipal suffrage in 1913, neighborhood families began working to extend the vision of an activist, welfare-oriented local government they had devised in settlement clubs into formal electoral channels.

The idealism that accompanied whole-family politics shattered with the declaration of war in Europe in 1914. Global warfare abroad and racial violence at home exposed the challenges of bringing club ideals and methods into the world beyond settlement doors. “Democratic Ensembles” concludes by identifying postwar trends in settlement work and gesturing towards the subsequent evolution of settlement artistic methodologies, particularly their codification and widespread dissemination by mid-twentieth-century Chicago theatre practitioners and educators. Amidst the continued struggle to bring collaborative values and social consciousness into formal politics, Chicagoans’ persistent commitment to neighborhood arts programs as a force for grassroots change has emerged as one of the most hopeful legacies of the Progressive Era.

Although the dissertation phase of this project is ending, it is only the beginning for “Democratic Ensembles.” In the months and years to come, I intend to transform the dissertation into a book that has crossover appeal for scholars, practitioners, and the wider public. I look forward to continuing to mine settlement archives and sharing the stories they contain in a variety of formats, from academic writing to public performance.[4] The questions posed by settlement workers and participants over a century ago remain relevant today: as we continue to work towards more inclusive and equitable futures, how can engaging in everyday acts of cultural production help to foster common understanding, celebrate diversity, and provide the framework for an ensemble-based politics?

Fiona Maxwell is a final-year PhD Candidate in History at the University of Chicago. Her research and creative practice explore the connections between spoken performance and democratic social movements, with a focus on Progressive Era Chicago. In addition to her own writing and performance activities she collaborates with museums and arts organizations on content and program development. You can reach her at fmaxwell@uchicago.edu.

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[1] I detail a key facet of this archive—club newspapers—in Fiona Maxwell, “Club Newspapers and Civic Collaboration at Chicago Settlement Houses,” C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Podcast, Season 8, Episode 3 (October 21, 2024). https://on.soundcloud.com/FY7sAtBt6ePA84pZ7

[2] For an article-length study of the gender dynamics of oratorical pedagogy at the Cumnock School, see Fiona Maxwell, “‘Expression is power’: Gender, residual culture and political aspiration at the Cumnock School of Oratory, 1870–1900,” Gender & History (2024): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12786

[3] For an example of this process, as illustrated by the Home Culture Club of young workingwomen, see Fiona Maxwell, “‘Talking lowd and laughing gay, Everyone has so much to say’: Working Girls’ Clubs, Spoken Art and Political Organising at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890–1920,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal (2025): 109-130. http://doi.org/10.22459/LFHJ.30

[4] I perform original, semi-fictional storytelling pieces based on settlement archival materials at universities, public history sites, and storytelling venues. Select appearances include Open House Chicago at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (2024) and Chicago Storytelling in Bughouse Square at the Newberry Library (2022).