Category: Books

This post was written by Dr. Rima Lunin Schultz and given at the Centennial Symposium on Twenty Years at Hull-House, at the Chicago History Museum, November 13, 2010.

Most people, if they have read anything by Jane Addams, have read Twenty Years.  It has become the basis of our popular understanding and knowledge of the life of Jane Addams and it has become the standard source for readers interested in the history of Hull-House, the settlement Addams established with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889.  Much of the urban folklore of the Hull-House neighborhood and the mythology about Addams also originates in Twenty Years.

At age forty-nine and already well-known in the United States for her work in the social settlement field, Jane Addams published “Autobiographical Notes Upon Twenty Years at Hull-House,” in a series of six installments in American Magazine (April, May, June, July, August, and September, 1910). Twenty Years at Hull-House appeared in book form later that year (November) and immediately became a best seller going through six printings and nearly 17,000 copies in the first year– it has never gone out of print. Addams did not write a history of Hull-House, nor a traditional autobiography, but a work that incorporated aspects of both genres without following the conventions of either.  Perhaps the label “personal narrative” approximates its genre.  For a long time scholars have treated her memoir as a historically accurate work. Lately, as a result of new research that utilizes the vast correspondence of Addams and other archival sources, Twenty Years at Hull-House is now regarded as a self-conscious construction rather than a work of history.

Addams identified two reasons for writing it: she wanted to set the record straight on the origins and motivations of the social settlement movement; and she hoped to “start a backfire” to “extinguish” two biographies of herself; one had been submitted to Addams in outline form and she was dismayed because it “made life in a Settlement all too smooth and charming.” (viii)  Addams facetiously dubbed the former reason “worthy” and the latter “unworthy.”  Her explanations for writing Twenty Years as she approached her fiftieth year are not very persuasive.  Addams had been dedicated to “setting the record straight” about social settlements from the moment she opened the doors of Hull-House.

Planting publicity in the press, encouraging journalists to visit Hull-House and write about the scheme, as she labeled the initial settling efforts undertaken with Ellen Starr, and taking every opportunity to accept speaking engagements were part of the strategy for getting the settlement off the ground. Letters written by Jane and Ellen at this time to relatives and close friends reveal how ambitious and how calculating the women were as they sought to assemble residents to populate the settlement and form the new community, and volunteers to assist with the work. By 1892 Addams had assumed the position of leadership of the new social settlement movement and her two maiden addresses given at a conference in Plymouth, Massachusetts, described the subjective necessity for settlements, [chapter six in Twenty Years at Hull-House] the major philosophical statement for the movement, and reported on the initial projects begun at Hull-House. The two addresses appeared in the 1893 edited publication Philanthropy and Social Progress, which was followed in 1895, by the co-authored Hull-House Maps and Papers volume; better known for the colorful and innovative maps, the volume ended with an outline sketch by Addams on Hull-House activities and programs, illustrated with photographs, and dedicated to setting the record straight about settlements. Another article in Maps & Papers by Addams, “The Settlement As  A Factor in the Labor Movement,” was an effort to clarify and define.  The more autobiographical focus begins to appear in early 1906 with “Some Childhood experiences of Jane Addams” in the March 1^st Unity. Three articles combining autobiography with her story of Hull-House, which prefigured Twenty Years were published by Ladies Home Journal in March, April, and May of 1906.  I think the pattern is clear.

In searching for the reason why Addams in 1909 would begin to think about a writing project that would tell, once again, the story of her life at Hull-House, one is impressed with the encouragement she was getting for this project from publishers, magazine editors, and people in the progressive network. Ida Tarbell, the muckracking journalist, was one of these people who took an interest in encouraging Addams to write her autobiography. I am speculating here that Tarbell and others in the progressive network wanted to gain momentum from the interest and publicity the story of Jane Addams would ignite. This was a sure way to influence the political climate and inspire a great army of voters– and potential women voters waiting in the wings– to get on the band wagon. There was a buzz about Addams: she was held in great esteem by this progressive network that since the 1890s was growing in numbers, gathering women and men who wanted to uplift and purify American politics, protect women and children from the worst abuses of the industrial system, and bring about a whole constellation of reforms to modernize and perfect the American nation.

It suited Addams because she wanted as broad an audience for her writings as possible, as indicated by her choice of serialization in popular magazines and publication of hardcover editions almost at the same time.  Most of what she published in hardcover had started as a lecture and/or a magazine or journal article. Typical was the way she worked the networks of liberal, educated folk who congregated annually at summer encampments run by the Chautauqua Society. Addams had been a regular lecturer at Chautauqua, choosing topics that she was developing as articles or books; she frequently spoke about social settlements, spreading the ideas of the movement. When Twenty Years came out, a detailed guide to the book was printed in the society’s house organ, The Chautauquan, and members were encouraged to form study groups. These were her people: American born, white, liberal Protestant, middle-class, educated, citizens ready to be enlightened in the morally righteous causes of progressivism. In 1905 Addams, with hopes of shaping civic consciousness to support progressive educational reforms, and trusting in the basic good will of educated, liberal Protestants, told her Chautauqua audience that they were “the ones who will most readily understand this great demand [to understand working class  and immigrant children’s needs] which is coming to us adult Americans that they will come to understand the peoples from all parts of the world and to find out what it is that they have that will be of benefit to us. . . until we are all ashamed of ourselves when we are separated by differences of language or differences of dress and manner, or when we are content to go along day by day and say no word of fellowship.” [1] In hopes of encouraging their activism, Addams told her audience “You have come together here and marched together, not because you happened to live next door to each other, but because you are moved by a great common impulse, because you have studied the great masterpieces of literature, and have read together some of the great studies in science. You have discovered in what fellowship consists,” complimenting them Addams then delivered her punch line: “It would be a great human achievement if you could bring that into the life about us, into our cities” and support efforts to bring recreation and play into the lives of children before they become part of the industrial system.[2] Whether or not they shared the totality of Addams’s vision of social democracy, these were the people who would march to “Onward Christian Soldiers” at the Progressive Party convention in Chicago in 1912, where Addams seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt for president of the United States. Addams was the interpreter of the world of immigrants, poverty, sweatshops and the traffic in white slaves to this vast aggregation of Americans.  This audience was eager to know as much as they could about Jane Addams. They found her storytelling appealing and her ideas about social ethics and democracy palatable in the personal narrative in which they were wrapped.  A fan letter from the principal of a New York City high school called Twenty Years “the biggest inspiration of the year to us.” His faculty, of two hundred and eleven teachers had shared the book, marked passages in it, and quoted from it at meetings. How much the book resonated for them is apparent in his observation: “The oneness of the race gets startling proof when we find you, as for instance, in the sixth chapter, ‘subjective necessity,’ saying things that so many of us have mightily thought and felt but never formulated. It’s a great book, madam, a tonic.” [3]

Addams did not want to be led by the groundswell of reform, or overwhelmed by it as it grew. She wanted to lead and to have influence in setting the goals and defining the direction. One way that Twenty Years can be viewed, I am suggesting, is as Addams’s attempt to revive the original spirit of the social movement of the late 1880s and early 1890s and bring it to bear in the political climate of 1910.  If Twenty Years had been written by a man with the reputation and following of Jane Addams we might well call it a political testament in preparation for a campaign in the not-too-distant future.

Addams captures the early vigor, the risk-taking, and the open discourse on social problems that typified the opening years at Hull-House when the settlement began the “Working People’s Social Science Club.” “So far as I have been able to reproduce this earlier period,” Addams explains, “ it must reflect the essential provisionality [sic] of everything; ‘the perpetual moving on to something future which shall supersede the present,’ that paramount impression of life itself, which affords us at one and the same time, ground for despair and for endless and varied anticipation.” (196-197)

If this is, indeed, a personal narrative, perhaps even a political testament, how should we treat the information we find in Twenty Years At Hull House? If we are teachers, what approach to the material should we encourage our students to take? Is it believable? Did things happen the way Addams describes? Has she left out people, events, conflicts?  Does that matter? Twenty Years needs to be treated in the way that memoirs are read: as fictive or creative constructions. We are in an age of criticism in which, someone might say to me, well, there is no objectivity in historical writing anyway, what’s the difference? Addams offers a rather modern (or should I say postmodern?) observation about the subjectivity of historical narrative: “It has been hard to determine what incidents and experiences should be selected for recital,” Addams explained. “I have found,” she goes on, “that I might give an accurate report of each isolated event and yet give a totally misleading impression of the whole, solely by the selection of the incidents.” (vii.)  Without going into a theoretical discussion of the nature of historical narrative, let’s agree that just as the autobiographical first four chapters of Twenty Years have been understood as closer to the genre of fiction, the last fourteen chapters of the book warrant similar scrutiny and have, however, often been taken at face value as the real story of what actually happened at Hull-House.

Another reason why we must treat Twenty Years in total as closer to fiction than to historical writing, is that Addams makes no effort to separate her personal story or autobiography from the story of Hull-House. If there is any “history” here at all, it is entirely from the perspective of Addams: she is Hull-House; Hull-House is Addams.  In many ways this approach of Addams gives us a book that, after the age of twenty-nine, when she arrives at Hull-House, the personal is left out, for once Addams begins the story of the settlement, her private life disappears from view (thus we know nothing personal about Mary Rozet Smith and Ellen Gates Starr and their relationships with Addams excepting those pieces of information needed in reference to a particular story of Hull-House that Addams has selected to tell.) Addams’s reluctance or refusal to write about her closest and most important colleagues in the development of the settlement, which she makes clear in the preface she will not be able to do, gives the book its strangest characteristic: the reader feels almost overwhelmed by the details of daily life at the settlement. Addams regales us with one story after another, threading them together with more lofty observations about the social philosophy underpinning the efforts of the residents, sometimes named, and other times remaining anonymous. My, you say to yourself, this is great stuff, this is insider information. But upon reflection, learning from other sources more about Hull-House, you are struck by what has been missing in Twenty Years. To begin with, where is Ellen Gates Starr? She is the “we” of the chapter, “First Days At Hull House,” but in no way is the force of her personality and her passion for social justice revealed, nor do we understand the substantial role she plays in the formation of relationships with working-class and Catholic neighbors, or in her charismatic ability to engage young women from the upper classes who she had taught for almost a decade at the Kirkland School in Chicago, and bring them to Hull-House to volunteer in the nursery, the kindergarten, the art rooms.  The four pillars upon which the whole enterprise was carried out: Enella Benedict, head of the art school; Edith de Nancrede, head of the children’s social clubs and theatrical performances, including an ambitious dance program; Eleanor Smith, head of the music school; and Louise deKoven Bowen, treasurer of Hull-House and, with Addams, a partner in fund-raising, a lifelong trustee, and, with Helen Culver, the major benefactor of the place, all are MIA—missing in action. These women are mentioned almost in passing. Each of them remained at Hull-House for about four decades — Bowen actually longer — and a reading of the oral interviews of men and women who grew up attending Hull-House illustrates how much they were the backbone of the settlement house as an institutional entity.  This, once more, points to Addams’s goal in writing Twenty Years: it is not to give an accounting of the institutional development of the settlement house but to recall, instead, the spirit of the place when groundbreaking events were taking place and the political climate seemed in tune with the “renaissance” in religious or humanitarian sentiment that had spurred individuals with a variety of reform ideas to coalesce together.  Jane Addams had entered into this crusade in 1889 wearing the Chi-Rho Cross of early Christianity: emboldened as the early band of religious idealists in their pre-institutional efforts to heal an ailing world. Her personal and political dilemma was to find ways to re-invigorate herself and the movement that she had come to lead.

Jane Addams’s approach to telling the story of twenty years at the settlement was to tell good fables or parables, Addams urban folktales awaken our moral indignation and leave us with an indelible picture, for example, of child labor by telling a tale on herself and the Hull-House residents.  It is one of the many times throughout Twenty Years that Addams wants us to know that the book is a story of the possibility of personal change in which individualism and isolation from the realities of our common life can be overcome. The moral awakening of the residents to the horror of the exploitation of children comes through in the wonderfully told story of the very first Christmas at Hull-House, that begins Chapter X: “Our very first Christmas at Hull-House, when we as yet knew nothing of child labor, a number of little girls refused the candy which was offered them as part of the Christmas good cheer, saying simply that they ‘worked in a candy factory and could not bear the sight of it.’ We discovered that for six weeks they had worked from seven in the morning until nine at night, and they were exhausted as well as satiated. The sharp consciousness of stern economic conditions was thus thrust upon us in the midst of the season of good will.” (198)  This urban folktale “works” because Addams frames it as a moment of discovery and a point in which the moral imagination has been stirred among the Hull-House residents, herself included, who “as yet knew nothing of child labor.”  Readers who do not know the history of campaigns for reform of labor conditions and the outlawing of child labor in Chicago might assume from the text that such initiatives and grassroots social activism were awaiting the leadership of Addams.  As eager new members of the Chicago Woman’s Club, Addams and Starr knew women who were already working with the Illinois Woman’s Alliance, on the problem of child labor. Established in the summer of 1888 after the Chicago Times ran a series of investigative reports entitled “City Slave Girls” — these exposes on the city’s sweatshops dramatically revealed the degrading and dangerous conditions in which women and children worked for long hours obtaining pitiably low wages. The Alliance campaigned for factory inspection, new schools, compulsory education, sweatshop regulation, public baths, an end to child labor, and no more police victimization of prostitutes, all agenda items soon to be taken up by the Hull-House residents, who within a short time would first join in with the Illinois Woman’s Alliance and, then, under Florence Kelley’s dynamic leadership, reorganize the movement to abolish sweatshops and end child labor.

Addams’s words provide the emotional truth of the event through the juxtaposition of the cozy glow of fellowship and celebration of Christmas with the realization that the party for the children had been planned without connection to their lives.

As I have indicated already, instead of writing in depth about her closest associates, Addams makes the unique narrative choice to focus on two internationally known figures: Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy who take center stage in chapters named for them. This is an intriguing set of narrative choices that begs for interpretation and, I hope, provokes all of you today to participate in the discussion section of our program.  Why did Addams chose this route in the organization of her book? In her rambling, anecdotal account of a variety of activities and experiences for the purposes of reviving the original impulse of settling, Lincoln and Tolstoy fit as serious influences in her life who also, conveniently, had instantaneous recognition with her audience. Their iconic value in the popular culture of the time meant that they were in the vocabulary of the intended audience for her book. Today’s readers have some sense of the importance of the Lincoln mythology in American politics and in the national narrative. Addams use of anecdotes to tie her father to the Lincoln myth also binds the generations of Americans born, as she had been in the era of the Civil War, to her story.  “Thousands of children in the sixties and seventies, in the simplicity which is given to the understanding of a child, caught a notion of imperishable heroism when they were told that brave men had lost their lives that the slaves might be free,” Addams intones. [30] Scholars have noted how Addams insinuates herself into the male journey theme by associating herself so closely to her father and to Lincoln. Addams brings the promise of American equality and justice to her personal narrative by linking herself to the American eagle called “Old Abe” who lives in the sacred civic space of the state capitol dome in Madison, Wisconsin. With her family she traveled to Madison, “the entire journey to the veteran war eagle . . . itself symbolized that search for the heroic and perfect which so persistently haunts the young” she recalls, and describes how at the state capitol she “stood under the great white dome of Old Abe’s stately home … [and] dimly caught a hint of what men have tried to say in their world-old effort to imprison a space in so divine a line that it shall hold only yearning devotion and high-hearted hopes.” [28-29] Then, in a feat of great writing, Addams becomes part of the great American narrative: “Certainly the utmost rim of my first dome was filled with the tumultuous impression of soldiers marching to death for freedom’s sake, of pioneers streaming westward to establish self-government in yet another sovereign state.” [29] She “caught the notion of the martyred President as the standard bearer to the conscience of his countrymen.” [29] In England she heard the philosopher Edward Caird describe how Lincoln “’was content merely to dig the channels through which the moral life of his countrymen might flow’” [40].  As a storyteller Addams has fashioned a wonderful tale of her journey from childhood to adulthood in which she traveled accompanied by the moral influence of Lincoln. “Is it not Abraham Lincoln who has cleared the title to our democracy?” she asks rhetorically at the chapter’s end.  [42] In the emancipation of the slaves Lincoln had saved democratic government for Addams’s generation.

There were many influences in her life but to claim Abraham Lincoln as a singular influence (and to respectfully subsume her father in this story of formative influence) was to craftily elevate her own story and merge it with the story of the American nation.  We need to remind ourselves that Addams was writing at a crucial moment in the national narrative: The NAACP, of which Addams was a founding member, started, as W.E.B.  Du Bois recalled, “with a lynching 100 years after the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and in the city, Springfield, Illinois, which was his long time residence.” [4] Nowhere in Twenty Years does Addams relate to the reader how by 1910 the nation’s failure to live up to the promise of the emancipation had informed her life or, perhaps, filled her with a sense of urgency to move the country toward a progressive agenda; the opposite prospect was real to her, the failure to live up to the second chance that Lincoln had given the nation, was all too real.

A second bold narrative choice was to confess great interest and admiration, but ultimately not discipleship, with Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy was very popular among educated American Protestants in late nineteenth-century; that was why Addams’s Chautauqua lectures on Tolstoy were sought after; writing about Tolstoy and Lincoln assured Addams an audience because they were such popular figures.  In 1896 Addams traveled to Tolstoy’s estate outside of Moscow “with the hope of finding a clew [sic]to the tangled affairs of city poverty.” She wrote, “I was but one of thousands of our contemporaries who were turning towards this Russian, not as to a seer—his message is much too confused and contradictory for that—but as to a man who has had the ability to lift his life to the level of his conscience, to translate his theories into action.” [262] Addams rejected Tolstoy’s admonition to only live by your own labor and to cast off property and wealth,  and consequently offered her middle- class audience a way to translate good Christian ideals into action without extremism. Her message was not against property, but was a plea that each citizen realize the interdependence of all, and work to develop a sense of social obligation and take responsibility for the common good.  That common good could be achieved, in fact in a heterogeneous industrial society, could only be achieved, through the mediation of conservatives and radicals, workers and employers, women and men, believers and unbelievers.  Social settlements were the instrument to teach this message; and they were the civic space or centers where such mediation would occur.

These narrative choices were not simply literary devices, although they certainly resonated well in the context of American popular culture. They reflected an idealization of life at Hull-House. Addams believed in the power of art to provide moral uplift and spiritual healing; she was never without a portrait of Leo Tolstoy near her desk or in her room; Lincoln’s birthday was celebrated regularly in the early days of the settlement.  Two iconic murals , one of Tolstoy and one of Lincoln were painted by resident artists on the walls of the auditorium of the Hull-House Theater to, as Addams explained, “portray those cosmopolitan heroes who have become great through identification with the common lot, in preference to the heroes of mere achievement.”  (396)  Addams’s personal narrative of Twenty Years at Hull-House remains a powerful literary document of her faith in democracy.

[1] Jane Addams, “Work and Play as Factors in Education,” The Chautauquan, A Weekly Newsmagazine; Nov. 1905; 42, 3; American Periodicals Series Online, pg. 251.] An article in Outlook, Dec. 9, 1905, describes Chautauqua culture & offers insights for understanding Addams’s audience. “The Spectator,” Outlook,, Dec. 9, 1905; 81, 15; American Periodical Series Online, pgs. 860-863.

[2] Addams, “”Work and Play as Factors in Education,” 253.

[3] McAndrew, William to JA, New York, NY, 1913 Oct 20, Swarthmore College peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1, JAP Reel 7-1148.

[4] The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: International Publishing Co., 1968), 254.