This post comes from a talk by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Performing the People, The People Performing: Theatre and Dance at Hull-House Conference, held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, September 19-20, 2003.
Before I launch into my formal talk, I would like to acknowledge the fine work of Ellen Skerrett, associate editor of the history website Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963. In the process of preparing the section of our website that deals with the Performing Arts at Hull-House, we were able to locate the script for the play, Halsted Street, perhaps the only copy that has survived; we also found a wonderful unpublished memoir of a Hull-House resident, Donna Hodgman. Her manuscript contains the fullest description of the events surrounding the production of Halsted Street. Ellen wondered if Donna Hodgman’s son, Christopher, nicknamed “Kit,” who lived with his mother and father in one of the residents’ apartments in the Boys’ Club Building at Hull-House, could be found. Ellen tracked him down and I am happy to announce that he is here today. Dr. Christopher Hodgman’s notes about his boyhood at Hull-House, Donna Hodgman’s manuscript, and the Halsted Street script are all on our website in the Historical Narrative section under the Performing Arts at Hull-House, along with many other texts and images. Sarah Hoadley, also an associate editor of the website, prepared electronic versions of the documents and has written the editorial notes. Dean Judith Kirshner of the College of Architecture and the Arts and Professor Margaret “Peg” Strobel, Interim Director of Hull-House Museum have been generous in their support of the website and this theater project.
My role today is to introduce an audience in 2003 to the late 1930s depression- milieu in which the unusual Hull-House theatre production, Halsted Street, was conceived and staged. Economic and social events following the 1929 Wall Street crash and the spreading unemployment that continued through the 1930s had changed the political and cultural landscape of the American nation. The Federal Theatre, part of the New Deal’s WPA, introduced millions of Americans to new forms—the Living Newspaper, agit-prop drama, the drama of social criticism. In Chicago race and class issues erupted and protest politics took shape. The National Negro Congress (NNC) had strong Chicago support; Theodore Ward’s play Big White Fog, a Chicago Federal Theatre production, created controversy with its critique of capitalism and portrayal of Garveyism and socialism as alternatives for the black masses.
At Hull-House, the oldest and the largest settlement house in the United States, internal changes combined with the larger social forces in society. The death of Jane Addams in 1935 had personal and institutional repercussions for the residents and staff. Yet newcomers continued to find their way through the front doors. Donna and Crosby Hodgman had come to Hull-House because they “kept reading about the depression in the New Republic” and thought that residency at Hull-House would connect them to the struggle.[1] The Hodgmans, with their nursery-age son, Kit, moved into one of the residents’ apartments in the Boys’ Building. During the day Crosby taught at the Chicago Latin School, an expensive private institution; Kit attended the nursery in the Mary Crane School in the Hull-House complex, and Donna taught citizenship classes and then became the “House Manager.” We learn about the staging of the play Halsted Street and about conditions at the famous settlement from 1936 to 1942, through the “eyes” of Donna Hodgman. Her status as a newcomer freed her from the worst sort of sentimental memorializing of Jane Addams and her critique of the dingy and worn out interior spaces and the breakdown of leadership among the remaining Hull-House standard bearers is confirmed in the Trustees’ Minutes of the Hull-House Association. Hull-House was in trouble in 1936.[2]
With the arrival of Charlotte Carr in 1937, the settlement once again reverberated with the vitality and enthusiasm of women and men with a cause. There were still serious administrative and budgetary problems, but there was an infusion of federal funds, WPA workers, and strong leadership. By 1938 there were ninety-eight residents at Hull-House; seventy-five were paid salaries, and there were between sixty and eighty volunteer workers.. [3]
The desegregation of Hull-House began in these years and coincided with the publication of Hull-House Magazine, edited by William Schenk, with associate editors Willard F. Motley and Alex Saxton. Motley did not reside at Hull-House but participated in the cultural life of the settlement, calling it his university; an African American writer steeped in the lore of the West Side neighborhood, he and Alex Saxton developed a friendship, one of the inter-racial friendships that became possible at this time in the New Deal milieu of Hull-House. Saxton, a Hull-House resident, said he first became aware of racism because of his engagement and belonging to the Communist Party. He read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road and learned black history from the CP branch in Chicago. Other residents at the time included Communists Harvey and Jessie O’Connor; Harvey was formerly editor of The People’s Press; Schenk collaborated with Jess Ogden on the Halsted Street script. [4] Alice Treleaven, who had been employed by the Adult Education Project of the W.P.A., teaching workers’ education at Chicago Commons, had left that position to work at Hull-House. Jerry Ingersoll, a Dartmouth College graduate developed classes in civics and labor problems. Leah Dickinson, an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers who had six years’ experience in settlements—Kinsley House in Pittsburgh, and Christadora and Union settlements in New York—was Charlotte Carr’s assistant. [5]
There are three observations I want to make about Hull-House in the late 1930s. The first one is that it was extremely difficult for old timers who remained after Addams’s death in 1935 to see anyone else in the leadership role at Hull-House, either as Head Resident or on the Board of Trustees. Even as they reminded themselves that Jane Addams would be the first to embrace change, they lived in their memories as they attempted to work in the present. Charlotte Carr’s five years were difficult ones since she made the trustees and older residents uncomfortable from the first moment she arrived. The trustees, who were more cautious than the residents, had to be persuaded to allow the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee to rent Bowen Hall for a meeting to discuss the policing of industrial disputes with a showing of the Paramount newsreel of the 1937 Memorial Day riot in South Chicago near the Republic Steel Plant. [6] They found it difficult to find “new blood” to invigorate the Hull-House Association board and continued to look for trustees who replicated their own class and social status.[7] This makes the staging of Halsted Street an unusual Hull-House production.
My second observation is that the Hull-House facilities were in terrible disrepair. The worst part about the physical deterioration of the place was the pressure it placed on the trustees to fund raise for maintenance and upkeep at a time of economic crisis. In 1929 at a conference of settlement leaders that included Graham Taylor of Chicago Commons, Mary E. McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement, and Addams, the three icons of the social settlement movement were asked what they would do differently if they had the chance. Addams replied that perhaps they had grown too large and were hampered by the physical space they inhabited: “There are too many roofs,” she noted, and the implication was that they all needed repairs.[8] Charlotte Carr had to deal with the repairs at the same time that she was trying to develop new programs. When federal programs ended in 1939, Carr and the board began to dip into unrestricted endowment funds to cover the annual deficit. When the trustees refused to accept her budget for 1943, Charlotte Carr resigned. [9] Carr and Ogden’s “freedom” to stage Halsted Street was directly related to the infusion of federal money to support the Workers’ Education Department staff at Hull-House.
My third observation is that even in this period of upheaval and change, the value of artistic expression in the lives of ordinary people continued to be one of the major goals of Hull-House and was embraced by oldtimers and newcomers alike. The production of Halsted Street in 1939 was an affirmation that art had a fundamental role in people’s lives.
The various federal arts programs during the New Deal had much in common with Hull-House’s legacy of “Art for the People.” One of the first activities at Hull-House had been the Shakespeare Club, conducted by Ellen Gates Starr, in which neighbors read plays. A raised space in the first floor parlor or drawing room became a “stage” for performances, followed in 1893 with the construction of theater space in the Gymnasium and Coffee House Building and, finally, in 1899 when the Hull-House Theatre was built.[10]
Theater at Hull-House always had social objectives and these were privileged above any “art for art’s sake” approach. As Stuart Hecht has detailed, Addams selected directors who shared her values and endorsed the inclusive participation of children, adolescents, and adults in social drama clubs. Only the Hull-House Players, directed by Laura Dainty Pelham from 1900 to 1924 and, after her death, by Maurice J. Cooney from 1924 to 1941, were exclusive in the selection of participants.
Edith de Nancrede’s work with the Hull-House Children’s Theatre and the multitude of social drama clubs she directed, was the purest expression of Jane Addams’s concept of the function of drama [11] After Nancrede’s death in 1936, Hull-House struggled to reconfigure its drama programs. Helen Tieken Geraghty, a student of Max Reinhardt, became director of the Actors’ Guild at Hull-House. She, too, saw the social and educational possibilities of theatre and proposed a Hull-House People’s Theatre in 1939 as an artistic and cultural expression of the various ethnic and racial groups in the neighborhoods near the social settlement. The proposed People’s Theatre, like the Hull-House Labor Museum, established by Jane Addams in 1900, would be a showcase for the different cultural traditions found in the neighborhood with the goal of developing mutual respect and understanding. Unfortunately, there was no money for such an initiative. [12]
It was in Jess Ogden that Charlotte Carr found the most able practitioner of the Hull-House theater spirit. He incorporated “the Mexicans, Negroes, Greeks, and Italians of the neighborhood” into the process and encouraged a collaborative spirit[13] but according to Donna Hodgman, Ogden was the creative force and the play, Halsted Street, was his creation. “I couldn’t make head or tail from the descriptions I heard,” she wrote. Ogden talked about using blackouts instead of a traditional curtain. The stage was to have several levels that she “couldn’t visualize . . . at all!” [14] There was going to be a model streetcar on stage that was going to contain the speaking chorus. An elevated historical panel was to be constructed “in which true stories of the past will be re-enacted.” [15] Advertised as an “animated mural” Halsted Street was billed as a play about “the concept democracy” that had as its main theme “the need for racial cooperation.” [16] Along with the model streetcar, skits and the elevated historical panel, the play also used poems by Carl Sandburg, selected by William Schenk from the poet’s Chicago Poems, from Slabs of the Sunburnt West, and From Smoke and Steel. Schenk’s note in the typescript reads: “In 1914, Carl Sandburg, the American poet, extended an invitation to the cartoonists of Chicago. This May [1939] Hull-House accepts. The poet said, “Come you cartoonists/Hang on a strap with me here/At seven o’clock in the morning/On a Halsted Street Car.[17]
Although we have recovered the file that contains the typescript for the play, including the chorus and at least one historical scene, the Sandburg poems, and a rough drawing of the stage set with some stage directions, we can only speculate just how Halsted Street was staged.[18]
The Halsted Street production evoked the themes and theatrical techniques of the experimental plays of the Federal Theatre Project. Prior to Carr’s arrival, Hull-House had had little if any contact with the Chicago branch of the Federal Theatre Project, although its Children’s Theatre group had won a National Youth Administration drama competition. [19]
Carr had no particular interest or knowledge of the performing arts. A Vassar graduate, she had served as a policewoman in New York City, patrolling the Brooklyn Bridge during World War I, as Secretary of Labor of Pennsylvania under a liberal and reform administration, and as a director of relief in the early years of the Great Depression in New York City under Mayor LaGuardia. She had never worked in a settlement house.[20] But she liked the idea that permeated the Federal Theatre Project and Workers’ Education in the 1930s: using theater for workers’ education and for social change.
In the five years that Carr was Hull-House’s director, Carr and her staff used drama and pageantry to resolve ethnic and racial conflicts and to encourage those groups in the neighborhood who remained marginalized from the settlement to enter its doors. One of the most important decisions Carr made was to invite journalist Dewey R. Jones and his wife Faith Jefferson Jones, a social worker, to become the first African American residents at Hull-House. They lived at Hull-House with their son, Dewey Jr., who was a toddler.
Carr asked Dewey to conduct a study of black needs at the settlement; he had been a special assistant on black issues to Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and had been involved with Ickes’ efforts to guarantee integrated public housing in Chicago.[21] Jones’ too short stay at Hull-House (he died in April 1939) was just long enough for him to leave one of the few documents we have that addresses the conditions of race relations in the neighborhood and at the settlement. What he found was that the neighborhood in 1938 included the largest Italian population in Chicago, the largest Mexican colony and the second largest black colony. Almost no inter-racial work had been done by Hull-House, a fact that Jones believed “was [not] because of any policy of the House or any decision on anyone’s part but just because of a sort of taking for granted that if an institution was in the heart of the community and had facilities, everyone who needed them would take advantage of them.” [22]
Jane Addams, Jones discovered, had established a Negro mothers’ club in 1927 that met at Hull-House but never became part of the general settlement community. “They were not on any mailing list. They had their meetings only. Their children came the same night, and when the Federal government began to assist in this type of program Hull House acquired some WPA and NYA workers and one of them was assigned the job of corralling the Negro children and keeping them busy.” [23] Hull-House was not alone in its de facto segregation: the American people from top to bottom experienced the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II as a segregated society.
Charlotte Carr’s decision to create two new departments at Hull-House—the Community Service Department and the Workers’ Education Department—along with her reorganization of the settlement’s administrative structure, opened the door to inter-racial activities. The first dealt with the relationships of neighbors and nationality groups to one another, to their environment, and to Hull-House. The second expanded the traditional courses in citizenship and English to include outright education in workers’ rights, union organization, and issues of management and labor.
There were visible cultural expressions that I believe were the outcomes of her new approach. In 1938, the four major groups—Italian, Greek Mexican and black—cooperated together for the first time to present the Christmas tableaux, an annual event at Hull-House that had been, since its inception in the early years of the settlement, an expression of a universalized Christian symbolism. The 1938 version incorporated the “Italian conception of the birth of Christ; the Blessing of Christ in the church according to Greek tradition; ‘Pasada,’ the entrance into Bethlehem, according to Mexican conception; and the Adoration of the Magi from the black point of view. The play was accompanied by songs rendered by the group whose tableaux was on view at the time.” [24] This direct identification of the pluralism that existed even in the context of a collective celebration of Christmas was new for Hull-House. Differences in religious expression had been subsumed within the high culture of European or Western Christian art—the kind of images visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago could see; the music played at Christmas time at Hull-House was the kind performed by the Symphony Orchestra and in the Protestant and Americanized Catholic churches that still resisted the ethnic or regional customs and popular art of marginal ethnicities and races. This may have come about as a result of Jane Addams’s conviction that the settlement was a neutral ground in terms of religious belief; the Christmas tableaux could be construed as embodying universal ethical elements because the lack of denominational specificity was a guard against religious observance. Christmas was a cultural celebration at Hull-House rather than a religious worship service.
Only in the Labor Museum’s exhibitions and in the shops where textiles and pottery were produced, and in the ethnic drama productions by Greek, Italian, and Jewish social groups had Hull-House prior to 1935 highlighted the specificity of ethnicity; in these cases the focus on ethnic arts and crafts were part of an effort to promote mutual appreciation and respect between different ethnic groups.
The introduction in 1938 of ethnically specific religious expression in the Christmas Tableaux was dangerously close to incorporating the religious observance of each group. What it may have risked in terms of neutrality it gained in the sense of authenticity and empowerment ethnic and racial groups experienced when they were able to demonstrate their faith in a public place alongside others from related religious traditions.
In a similar vein Jess Ogden described the manner in which theater functioned to bring “about a harmony of the various groups with which the settlement must work.” He noted that there was a large Mexican group that had three factions composed respectively of Catholics, Communists, and liberals. Someone in the Hull-House staff came up with the idea of having a real Mexican fiesta. This became an opportunity to unite the various factions. Hull-House during the Addams’ s years scheduled an Italian night or a German night, but never attempted to incorporate the Italian street festa as a vehicle for promoting mutuality and understanding between the various factions within the Italian community. Ogden explained how Hull-House used the Mexican fiesta: “The older people of all factions were invited to recall traditions and customs and to help with the planning of the carnival. The younger people went to work on pageants and plays, each faction planning something in which it was especially interested. The help of other actors were enlisted and three episodes in the history of Mexico were finally produced before an audience composed of the entire community in carnival mood. Not only did the factions forget their differences in admiring each other’s contributions, but also there resulted a better understanding on the part of other groups in the community.” Both Ogden and Helen Tieken Geraghty, who also worked on the carnival, believed that the change wrought by the fiesta was not merely temporary but had lasting value. [25]
Halsted Street is the best example of how Carr and Ogden used the arts to foster racial and ethnic integration and cooperation. Hodgman said Ogden wanted the play “to have guts” and believed it had the power to pull together “all the existing dramatic groups” and in addition, “dozens of others” including “neighborhood people as well as residents.” [26] She quoted Ogden as saying, “I’d like to tie up all these little crotchety groups we’ve got here at Hull House, get ’em to work together on one big project that is as socially significant as all Hell. Get a lot of residents in on it too. Be good for ’em.” [27]
One of the residents who joined the project was Donna Hodgman’s husband, Crosby, who was asked by Ogden to take the part of the streetcar conductor. [28] “All Hull House now waited, breathless and high—and I too,” Donna wrote. A week before the preview performance the whole concept clicked for Donna: “Now at last I saw the stage with five levels . . . and the blackouts. I heard the music and the speech chorus. I saw little short skits on all sorts of subjects because all subjects belonged to Halsted Street the longest street in Chicago.” [29]
Donna repeated the choral lyrics: “All race . . . all creeds . . . all colors . . . all degrees. Halsted Street was everything and everybody: Chicago and the world. Love was on Halsted Street, and fighting, and stealing, and dirt, and joy, and nobility.” [30]
The chorus of Halsted Street sang out: “Jane Addams saw and faced and met/These things that are to show/Hull-House must see, and face, and strive to meet. There’s a keener fire under the melting pot right now/Than culture. It is common need.” [31] The message of the play is that the issues of industrial democracy have immediacy in this era of the Great Depression and provide the experience all share: “This is our living, all around us/ This is neither Negro Mexican nor Greek/ Nor Jew, Italian, nor Irish/[32]
Halsted Street previewed on May 19, 1939, to an audience of Hull-House Associates, a group that Charlotte Carr had put together to develop national support for the settlement. Dr. Robert Morss Lovett, a former Hull-House resident, who now taught literature at the University of Chicago and was the editor of the New Republic, was the main speaker at the dinner that evening, followed by the production of the play, Halsted Street. [33] Following the preview for an audience who could pay one dollar for a ticket, the play was scheduled for the neighborhood, with tickets priced at fifteen cents.[34]
For Donna Hodgman, the play was a success: “Hundreds of people acted the parts of their own lives; hundreds of others saw, and could not avoid the knowledge that they saw themselves.” [35] She counted the success in the fact that “the warring factions of Hull House had learned to work together on a single project with unprecedented success. We knew that Mexicans, Negroes, Italians, Greeks, and just plain Americans had, for a little while, stood shoulder to shoulder.”[36] Yet a play is never the panacea for what ails an institution like Hull-House in 1939. Three years later the Hodgmans left. Donna had been completely exhausted by her Hull-House job as House Manager.[37]
Jess Ogden, who felt that with Halsted Street they had “reached the saturation point” on pushing issues of social significance, turned once more to using the stage as a way of “getting all those warring groups working together.” [38] His production of The Pirates of Penzance included “almost everyone who had anything to do with Hull House” and was a triumph in cooperation “all the more significant” since Ogden left the settlement in 1941, one month before the opera was produced.[39] His leaving was the result of continuing budget problems. It also signaled the end of Hull-House’s engagement with the rhetoric and style of the New Deal experiment with theater for the people. The following year, Charlotte Carr ended her five-year affiliation with Hull-House. In a dramatic and public declaration, Carr announced that she had been fired and accused the Hull-House trustees of censoring her political activities. While the trustees denied that Carr’s political activities were the reason for the break-up, her radical stances were definitely part of her conflict with the board.
Halsted Street reflects the pre-war New Deal Era; although we do not have a complete script of the play, what has been preserved clearly indicates the cultural and political point of view of the residents and staff whose support from federal funding allowed them a significant degree of independence to produce what, by 1942, might appear to be too controversial a production. The hope of American democracy and the overwhelming faith in the diverse people of the neighborhood to transcend their differences and forge a better world calls out to us from the fragments of the script, the handwritten stage directions, and the descriptions of the production contained in the unpublished manuscript by Donna Hodgman. In 2003, the play continues to evoke a sense of cosmopolitanism, of the dignity of work, and of the richness and promise of our nation’s immigrant foundations.
[1] Donna Hodgman, “A Vast Vagueness,”p. 1. People Live At Hull-House, unpublished ms., 1943, JAMC.
[2] “A Vast Flowing Vagueness,” p. 30.
[3] “Minutes,” October 27, 1938, Board of Trustees, HHA, HHA Records, JAMC, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.
[4] “Minutes,” February 24, 1938, Folder 5, HHA Records, JAMC, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.
[5] Ibid.
[6] “Minutes,” January 21, 1928, Folder 5, HHA Records, JAMC, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.
[7] “Minutes,” January 27, 1939, March 24, 1939, September 22, 1939, January 26, 1940, December 17, 1941, January 28, 1944; Russell Ballard to Alma Petersen, October 21, 1952, Alma Petersen Correspondence Folder 309, HHA Records, JAMC.
[8] get citation.
[9] “Minutes,” December 1, 1942, HHA Records, JAMC.
[10] Hennie Reynders, [Hull-House Theatre Development: Management, Space and Buildings] from his essay “The Hull-House Theatre as Prosthetic Extension of Settlement Ideology, 1898-1933,” unpublished essay, 2003.
[11] Edith de Nancrede, “Dramatic Work at Hull-House,” Neighborhood (January 1928).
[12] Helen Tieken Geraghty, “Plans for the Work: The Development and Organization of a People’s Theatre at Hull-House,” typescript, 1939, Geraghty Collection, JAMC, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.
[13] “Press Release,”1939, HHA Records, Folder 355.
[14] Hodgman, “Paint It White,” p. 15.
[15] “Press Release,” 1939.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Wm. P. Schenk, “Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg,” Halsted Street file, Folder 355, HHA Records, JAMC.
[18] Halsted Street file, Folder 355, HHA Records, JAMC.
[19] Patrick Schmitt, “The Chicago Federal Theatre Project: 1935-1939,” M.A. thesis, Communication and Theatre, the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, 1978.
[20] Milton Mayer, “Charlotte Carr—Settlement Lady,” Atlantic Monthly (December 1938): 741-748.
[21] Bryan and Davis, 100 Years At Hull-House, p. 229.
[22] Dewey R. Jones, “Integration at Hull-House,” in Bryan and Davis, 100 Years At Hull-House, pp. 230-231. This piece was excerpted from Jones’ report in the March 15, 1939, Minutes of the executive committee, Division on Education and Recreation, TMs, 7-9. Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers, Box 145, Folder 1: Minorities. Manuscript Collection, Chicago Historical Society.
[23] Jones, “Integration at Hull-House,” p. 231.
[24] “Confusion and Recovery: 1935-1962” in Bryan and Davis, 100 Years At Hull-House, pp. 211-212.
[25] Jean Carter and Jess Ogden, Everyman’s Drama: A Study of the Noncommerical Theatre in the United States. New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1938, pp. 66-67.)
[26] “Paint It White,” p. 15.
[27] “Paint It White,” p. 15.
[28] “Paint It White,” p. 15.
[30] Ibid., p. 17.
[31] Halsted Street typescript, p. 7.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Minutes, April 19, 1939, Board of Trustees, HHA Records,
[34] “Paint It White, p. 17.
[35] Ibid., p. 18.
[36] Ibid., p. 19.
[37][37] Christopher Hodgman, M.D., “At Hull-House As A Boy, 1936-1942,” unpublished memoir, 2003.
[38]Hodgman, “The People,” p. 18, in “People Live at Hull-House.”
[39] Ibid., p. 19. Ogden joined the Extension Program of the University of Virginia and worked in the field of Adult Education. He was also active in the community theatre movement.