This post was given by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Urban History Association Eighth Biennial Conference, on October 13-16, 2016.
Urban historians have been rethinking the relationship between urban space and religion in late nineteenth-century cities.[1] The work of Jane Addams and her fellow reformers at Hull-House, visualized in the 1895 Hull-House nationalities and wages maps[2], has cast a long shadow over scholars’ understanding of urban immigrant neighborhoods. The maps began a trend that identified maladjustment and pathology in these neighborhoods.[3] In selecting the thirty or so blocks east of Halsted Street to make the best “worst” case of bad housing and sweatshop conditions during their anti-sweatshop political campaign, Hull-House residents, with the leadership of Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, shaped the neighborhood in a lasting way in the public mind. Ironically, those unmapped blocks in the vicinity of Hull-House (including the settlement itself) which had better housing and cultural and religious institutions of value, were also “imagined” as a slum area and, eventually, deemed suitable for land clearance projects.
By the time that Hull-House resident Edith Abbott, now dean of the School of Social Work Administration at the University of Chicago, completed Tenements of Chicago 1908-1935, the images of the Near West Side slums had become iconic.[4] In this narrative, workers were not seen as community builders; working-class homeownership, if noted, was seen as a trap, an illusion of progress.
The intellect driving the maps and papers project was Florence Kelley, who had become a socialist during her graduate studies in Europe, and had worked with Frederick Engels in England, absorbing his methods of using government statistics. She was prepared to study Chicago’s sweatshops and factories.[5] As State Factory Inspector, Kelley and her assistants were already collecting data on tenements when in 1893 she was asked by Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Labor and statistician, to select the local area to be canvassed by census men for a federal study of slums in Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia.[6] Kelley was influenced by Charles Booth’s maps of poverty in London; she saw the opportunity to use the data from the canvass to create maps that would dramatically demonstrate sweatshop workers’ deplorable conditions.[7]
The thirty or so blocks selected were on the east side of the Nineteenth Ward. For many, this was the Holy Family parish, settled by Catholics before the Civil War. In 1893 it was one of the largest Irish Catholic parishes in the United States. Hull-House, founded in 1889, was a scrappy newcomer to the neighborhood, its institutional footprint puny in comparison to the Catholic streetscape.[8] In 1893, twelve Catholic schools existed in the Hull-House neighborhood.[9]
Addams’s Protestant mindset imagined immigrants “mov[ing] constantly from one wretched lodging to another;” as she told the Chicago Women’s Club, “they live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition, or public spirit; without social organization of any kind.”[10]
The maps, (and the major papers in the volume) by focusing on the sweatshop conditions of that one segment of the economy, ignored how local people actually defined where they lived, who they were, what they owned. Addams, in her preface, and Agnes Holbrook, who worked with the data to construct the maps and wrote the notes and comments for the maps, know how inadequate the representations are and they stress the transitory quality. It is a snapshot of a moment, captured in one dimension, and it is just a piece of a much more complex social fabric.
The religious factor actually loomed large in the consciousness of Progressive reformers who were overwhelmingly Protestant. Urban historians in neglecting the religious factor have ignored the anti-Catholic bias in the Hull-House maps. Implicit in the nationalities map is anxiety about the Catholic presence in the neighborhood. The nationalities mapped are actually classes or categories constructed from a “mental map” about race, religion, and ethnicity.[11]
Briefly, the color white represents English-speaking people, including English, English-Canadians, Scotch, all Americans of native parentage, and children born in this country of foreign parents who were over ten years of age, or, if younger, were in attendance in public schools.[12] Children under the age of ten of foreign parents who attended parochial schools were still aggregated as foreign. This reflected the Progressive Era’s anxiety about the influence of Catholicism in the formation of new citizens and the use of foreign languages in some parochial schools.[13]
Two other English speaking groups were placed in separate categories: “Negroes”[14] and the Irish (green) “form[ing] so distinct and important an element in our politics and civic life that a separate representation has been accorded them.”[15] The Hull-House political battles against the ward boss had already begun.[16] Imagine if the Irish and their children in parochial schools were “white” in the maps—-the neighborhood would not seem so “foreign.” Were Italians “white” on arrival? Could Irish Catholics assimilate into American culture even after many generations of citizenship in this country?
The wages map, covers the same blocks; the colors now indicate income by dwelling place.[17] The largest class in the district was colored blue and represented families earning from $5 to $10 a week, or in today’s equivalency, $125 to $250 a week.
The papers argue against blaming the victims of economic inequality and social injustice for their deplorable living conditions, instead portray them as hard working[18] underestimate the private associational strength of immigrants, and do not include a chapter on the Irish and Holy Family parish, the heart of the community.[19]
Had the project mapped the west side of the Nineteenth Ward, starting with the block where the settlement house was located (yes, the settlement does not get “mapped”) the narrative would have been dramatically different showing a more “mixed” neighborhood economically, with prosperous sections and brick residences, prosperous shops owned by immigrants, and lots of parochial schools and churches.
Even the east side, the area mapped, was not all of one piece. Italian families who lived in this congested “slum” did not describe it that way. The Tarsitano Italian family did not feel “poor” or characterize their living conditions as substandard. Three generations remained in the old neighborhood. In 1901 Leopoldo Tarsitano had settled in the east end around the Italian parish of Holy Guardian Angel. The Tarsitano family lived for several years in a flat and Leopoldo worked as a grocery cart peddler but by 1907 the family had saved enough money to buy their own two-story store front brick home located just west of Holy Guardian Angel Church, which was at 717 Forquer. Located east of Halsted Street, the church and school were in the area “mapped” as one of the worst industrial districts in Chicago. The Tarsitano store was on the first floor with the family living in the upper levels.
The Tarsitano children and grandchildren all participated in the cultural and recreational opportunities offered by Hull-House and were devotees of the summer camp in Waukegan. They attended church and parish school and, all of Leopoldo’s four granddaughters attended St. Mary High School in the vicinity. One became a physician, after graduating from Mundelein, the Catholic women’s college run by the Sisters of Charity Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs), and Loyola University Medical School; two became school teachers, graduating from Northern Illinois University; and another sister married and had children. Two of Leopold’s grandsons attended St. Ignatius Jesuit High School and Our Lady of Pompeii High School, the former attending the University of Illinois briefly and ending up with a business career at the managerial level; the latter graduated from Loyola University, did graduate work at De Paul and at the University of Nebraska and became a political science professor at the College of Du Page.[20]
The Italians in the Holy Guardian Angel parish were a stable, hard working people. They built the working class church of brick–more squat than tall. By 1910 its Sunday School claimed to be “one of the largest in the world” and in 1920 the congregation raised money for a new school building. Finding themselves located in the path of the Dan Ryan Expressway, in 1959 the old parish planned a new combination church and school structure at 860 West Cabrini, near Hull-House. The neighborhood was in a state of flux, but the parishioners had received assurances from the Mayor’s office as well as the chancery of the Archdiocese of Chicago that they had moved to a safe block that would not be part of any urban renewal plan. Urban politics in Chicago is not known for transparency or integrity. Hardly “settled in,” the new school and convent was demolished in 1963 to make way for the University of Illinois.
My argument here is that an unexpected outcome of the housing surveys was the conceptualization of working-class neighborhoods as one-dimensional places. The Tarsitano narrative is one of many similar stories of immigrant entrepreneurship, property ownership, intergenerational progress, and communal investments building neighborhoods of rich religious infrastructures.
There were plenty of problems in the Forquer and Halsted environs, including poverty and crime. Housing varied. The “imagined” neighborhood of the Protestant lady reformers” of good character” as community activist Florence Scala’s mother defined them[21], however, had made slum images iconic and had relegated the communal and social life of Forquer Street off of the map.[22] Florence Scala led the fight to save her neighborhood. As her nephew Father Steve Giovangelo explained: “Churches and Hull House co-existed and were at the center of social life.”
A remarkable, but missed opportunity, of Edith Abbott’s work was her use of parish histories for data and her acknowledgement that “these parochial histories provide some interesting and neglected source materials for the study of the social history of our American cities.“[23] My research, and that of others in the field, aims to bring the religious factor back in: This Da Prato map of Chicago clearly identifies the religious factor in urban life as ubiquitous.
[1] Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Ellen Skerrett, Born in Chicago: A History of Chicago’s Jesuit University (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2002); Rima Lunin Schultz and Ellen Skerrett, “‘Sister Builders’ in Chicago,” American Catholic Studies Newsletter, Vol. 42, Number 1 (Spring 2015).
[2] The Residents of Hull-House, Hull-House Maps and Papers. A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions. Introduction by Rima Lunin Schultz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007; facsimile reprint 1895 edition). The maps reflect data gathered by government men in April 1893. There are 10 essays, and an appendix that describes Hull-House and its work, and includes photographs of Hull-House’s exterior and interior space. There are no photographs or illustrations of the neighborhood. Five of the essays are about sweatshops, garment workers, and the state of public charity; three describe the Italians; the Jews; and the Bohemians respectively; Ellen Gates Starr and Jane Addams, co-founders in 1889, describe their ideas about art and labor, and the settlement house as a factor in the labor movement in two separate essays.
[3] Florence Kelley and Alzina Parsons Stevens contributed “Wage-earning Children” in Hull-House Maps and Papers which includes charts of the measurements of defective Chicago factory-children that were made by Dr. Bayard Holmes, from measurements taken in 1893-94, in the office of Florence Kelley, State Factory Inspector of Illinois, 87-88.
[4] Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago. 1908-1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), ix-x.
[5] Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), 102-03.
[6] Carroll D. Wright, “Introduction,” in Wright, The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia (1894 reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970) explains the federally funded projects. Four government men came to Chicago and conducted the door-to-door canvass supplied by Wright; Kelley selected the blocks to be surveyed.
[7]The area selected to be “mapped” is located across the street from the Hull-House settlement– between Harrison on the north and Roosevelt Road (12th Street) on the south; from the east side of Halsted on the west, to the south Loop–the area around Clark Street and Plymouth Court. It is an area of residences–cottages, tenements, two-and-four-flats–, factories, warehouses, railroad yards, stores, and brothels. Most of the people lived in various grades of housing in about thirty small blocks between Halsted and the river. East of the river the five residential blocks, crowded with people of color, were adjacent to the vice or brothel district.
[8] “The Little Sisters of the Poor,” Chicago Times (August 26, 1877): 8. Ironically, the first old age home run by the Little Sisters was in Charles Hull’s residence. The Hull family had moved out of the neighborhood during the Civil War period. The Little Sisters outgrew the Hull house soon after and moved to as larger institutional location they had built on Harrison Street, still in the neighborhood.
[9] Historian Ellen Skerrett documents twelve Catholic schools in the Hull-House neighborhood in 1892: Convent Academy of the Sacred Heart, opened fall 1860, 485 [1258] W. Taylor Street ; A free school at the northwest corner of Taylor and Lytle streets for girls of Holy Family parish, 1860; additional buildings for the Sacred Heart Academy complex were constructed in 1864 and 1886; Holy Family Boys School, new building at 462 [approx. 1231] S. Morgan Street] opened 1865; St. Ignatius College, 413 [1076] W. 12th Street [Roosevelt Road] opened 1870 (also enrolled young boys);St. Aloysius School, new building at 210 [631] W. Maxwell Street opened 1870; Holy Guardian Angel School, 168 [ 711] W. Forquer Street [Arthington Street] opened 1874;St. Joseph School, on W. 13th Street near Loomis Street [1413 W. 13th Street] opened 1876 ;St. Agnes School, 530 [approx. 1361] S. Morgan Street opened 1887; Ephpheta School for the Deaf, 409 [1100] S. May Street in operation by 1890 (see attached Tribune article on Eliza Allen Starr, March 16, 1890);St. Francis of Assisi School, new building at southwest corner of 12th and Newberry Avenue opened 1884 ;Notre Dame [French] School, new building at Oregon [Flournoy] and Sibley Street [approx. 1338 W. Flournoy] opened 1885; St. Wenceslaus [Bohemian] School, new building at 185 [710] W. DeKoven Street opened in 1893. Sources: “Province of Chicago,” [1890 statistics compiled on the Archdiocese of Chicago], in James J. McGovern, Souvenir of the Silver Jubilee in the Episcopacy of His Grace The Most Rev. Patrick Augustine Feehan, Archbishop of Chicago, 1890 (Privately printed, 1891), 242-253; Brother Thomas M. Mulkerins, S.J., Holy Family Parish Chicago: Priests and People, ed. Joseph J. Thompson (Chicago: Universal Press, 1923); Rev. Msgr. Harry C. Koenig, ed., A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago 2 vols. (Chicago: the Archdiocese of Chicago, 1980).
[10] “They move constantly from one wretched lodging to another; they live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition, or public spirit; without social organization of any kind.” [46-0481] And she also repeats that “[p]ractically nothing is done to remedy this.” [46-0481]She calls on those who have the “social tact and training, the large houses and traditions of custom and hospitality [who] live in other parts of the city” to stop the “fatal drifting apart” another phrase that is going to be repeated. Jane Addams, “Outgrowths of Toynbee Hall,” December 3, 1891, [address delivered to the Chicago Woman’s Club], in JAMC (reel 46-0480-0496), Special Collections, Daley Library, UIC.
[12] Holbrook explains that “it would be misleading to include children under ten years living in a foreign colony, not in attendance upon schools where English is sure to be used, speaking a foreign language, and, although born in this country, ignorant of American life, manners, people, and of the English tongue.” Ibid., 15.
[13] “It would be misleading,” Holbrook writes, “to include children under ten years of age living in a foreign colony, not in attendance upon schools where English is sure to be used, speaking a foreign language, and, although born in this country, ignorant of American life, manners, people, and of the English tongue.” Holbrook, “Map Notes and Comments,” 15.
[14] Ibid., 16-17.
[15] Holbrook, “Map Notes and Comments,” 16.
[16] Jane Addams’s experiences at the local ward level first as garbage inspector and then as a leading voice opposing Alderman Powers in 1899-1898 were eye-opening; by 1900 Addams could critique the reformers as well as the ward politicians, seeing the issue of local politics in a more complex way than had been possible when she first encountered the “boss.” “Jane Addams Wears a Star: Appointed to the Force of Garbage Inspectors by Commissioner Kent,” Chicago Record (April 25, 1895), 6; Jane Addams to Henry Demarest Lloyd, December 22, 1895, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Henry Demarest Lloyd Papers in JAMC (Reel 2-1829-1830), Special Collections, The University Library, UIC; “Two Women and A Man—Jane Addams, Amanda Johnson and John Powers: Remarkable Results Achieved by Womanly Influence Against Overwhelming Odds in the Nineteenth Ward,” Chicago Times-Herald (January 30, 1898), 25; Jane Addams, “Why the Ward Boss Rules,” Outlook 58, no. 14 (April 2, 1898), 881-882.
[17] Six categories ranging from less than $5 a week to over $20 were depicted: most of the households fell in the $5 to $10 range (blue); the poorest category (black) represented an average weekly family income of $5 or less. In today’s dollars approximately, households $5 or less a week are making under $125 per week; households making from $5 to $10 per week were making from $125 to $250 dollars a week in today’s dollars. (formula is $1 = $25)
[18] Humpal-Zeman, “The Bohemians of Chicago,” in HHM&P, 118.
[19]In “Hull House, Chicago: An Effort Toward Social Democracy,” Forum, October 1892, Jane Addams states that: “There are seven churches and two missions in the [Nineteenth] ward. All of these are small and somewhat struggling, save the large Catholic church [Holy Family] connected with the Jesuit College [St. Ignatius] on the south boundary of the ward and the French Catholic church [Notre Dame de Chicago] on the west boundary. There are but three out of these nine religious centres in which the service is habitually conducted in English.” The fact that English is only spoken in three out of the nine religious institutions is particularly upsetting to Addams. Addams also ignores the twelve Catholic schools in the Nineteenth Ward already established by 1892. “Province of Chicago,” [1890 statistics compiled on the Archdiocese of Chicago], in James J. McGovern, Souvenir of the Silver Jubilee in the Episcopacy of His Grace The Most Rev. Patrick Augustine Feehan, Archbishop of Chicago, 1890 (Privately printed, 1891), 242-253; Brother Thomas M. Mulkerins, S .J., Holy Family Parish Chicago: Priests and People, ed. Joseph J. Thompson (Chicago: Universal Press, 1923); Rev. Msgr. Harry C. Koenig, ed., A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago 2 vols. (Chicago: the Archdiocese of Chicago, 1980).
[20] Rima Lunin Schultz, “Public School ‘Secularists’ vs. Women Religious: Competing Visions for Educating Catholic Immigrants in Jane Addams’s Progressive Era Chicago, 1890-1925,” chapter in Crossings and Dwellings, edited by Kyle Roberts and Steven Schloesser, (Netherlands: Brill Publishing, forthcoming 2016-17).
[21] Father Steven Giovangelo, “Memo to Rima Lunin Schultz,” June 30, 2013, in author’s possession.
[22] Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago. 1908-1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), ix-x.
[23] Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago 1908-1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), xi.