Category: Hull-House

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Guest Post: Women’s Activism Before the Second Wave: The Case of Florence Scala’s Leadership in the Working Class Neighborhood of Hull-House

By Rima Lunin Schultz

Florence Scala speaking at City Hall in 1961 (Chicago Tribune).

In 1963, as Ann Keating recounted in her prior blog, Florence Scala had already been engaged as a social activist for several decades in the neighborhood made famous by Jane Addams. She had participated as a leader in the grassroots organization of her community on the Near West Side, had brought the various groups of people together in her  working-class neighborhood to develop a plan to improve the community and remain residents.  This challenged the pattern of urban renewal that had emerged after World War II in American cities, where working-class residents were being moved or were moving themselves into suburban locations  away from their original neighborhoods close to the central city and the cultural and social institutions that they as immigrants had built. Here was a different attempt to live in urban space in an integrating and economically and socially mixed community that supported working-class culture.  Scala’s neighborhood was not characterized as a strong hold of feminist militancy.  Rather it was a place filled with religious and cultural institutions, ethnic shops

Florence had run for political office by 1963, twice. She hadn’t succeeded in winning, but she had given the city political  organization, the political machine in Chicago, a scare. They had noticed her and worried about the spread of the democratic ideas and self-governing philosophy represented by her campaigns and her leadership.

When we look at the Scala’s story, it differs from the idea of a narrative of retreat, flight, and private life depicted by middle-class feminists of the second wave, when they began to develop a narrative of the origins of what they believed was a new and unique social movement of women who were being awakened from a kind of passivity and even apolitical consumerism as homemakers separated from the public events and public issues of the 40s and 50s and even early 60s. Remember 1963 is the publication date of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.   Florence Scala and the women of the near west side who joined her in the Harrison Halstead Street community group were not passive. They were not living private lives, disconnected from public issues. They were not separated from the challenges of urban life. Their narrative is very different.

Historians have begun the reclaiming or rediscovery of the working-class history in neighborhoods of urban America from the 1930s through the 1970s, and have begun to understand more fully that one of the major themes of the second half of the 20th century has been the transformation of cities by the intentional breakup of working-class neighborhoods. This was accomplished by the clearance of working class neighborhoods and the construction of upper and middle class housing in their place.

These working-class neighborhoods we have found in our research were never considered final or permanent parts of American urban life by the social reformers who cared deeply for the well-being of individual families, children, women, and men of the working classes but did not see the answer in working-class culture itself but only in the transformation of that working-class culture into something that resembled the middle class. It is not an accident then that we have failed to write the history of social activism of women of the working class.

We haven’t paid enough attention to the activities, daily life, and resistance and resilience of neighborhoods, the mixture of people and ideas that made up the social fabric of these neighborhoods and the value that the heterogeneity of these neighborhoods held for American democracy. Florence’s story becomes even more significant when we link it to the activities and efforts in cities across industrial America and when we begin to gather the biographies of women whose efforts to construct solutions for their communities brought them into public life alongside the men in the community just as they had joined the workforce at the beginning of the 20th century, even earlier, and had been visibly part of public life in working-class neighborhoods all along. They were never absent.

They were never isolated. They were connected and they were part of the social fabric of these communities. More than being part of the social fabric, they were builders of that social fabric along with male leadership and of course they had disabilities because of their sex.

How much credit should we  give for Scala’s activism  to Jane Addams and women of Hull-House? Florence is our best guide in evaluating the factors influencing her formation as a civic minded and ethically engaged community leader.

Jane Addams and children on the steps of terrace in front of the resident’s dining hall. (University of Illinois, Chicago , Jane Addams Memorial Collection).

What Florence tells us in her talk to the teachers at Andrew Jackson Elementary School in 1994 is an important message. She tells the teachers how meaningful their role was in the neighborhood. They were guides and models of some of the best things about being American. Florence tells us something additionally about them. She says, they were able to understand us, meaning the children of immigrants, because they were themselves the children of immigrants.

These Irish American school teachers who taught Florence and her brothers at the Andrew Jackson School were themselves the products of this experience of becoming American. They modeled a kind of civic life, a public life, as educated women whose standing in the community at that time was important. They were respected and they were leaders.

Hull-House production of a Tale of Two Cities. Florence Scala is second from left. (Wallace Kirkland. University of Illinois at Chicago).

In an interview Florence recounted that the Irish American teachers were catalytic in bridging her family to the Social Settlement.  Florence remembered that her parents were not that eager to let their children go to Hull-House as they were wary of  sending her away from their gaze, their supervision. We can speculate further about the complicated social fabric of the neighborhood and the various opportunities for social growth.  Many of the first and second generation American teachers had been educated in the Roman Catholic schools in working class neighborhoods.

But Florence’s parents listened to the school teachers and she went to Hull-House, where women like  Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop, stood out as exemplars of women who supported educational opportunities for immigrant and working class children.

Hull-House resident Edith de Nancrede (bottom left) and her social drama club. (University of Illinois at Chicago)

More than offering classes in the arts and in practical subjects, as well as history and civics, through clubs and summer camp Hull-House infused the working class children with a belief in their own value.  Scala explored her own interests and she realized there were possibilities for her own growth.  Florence made that connection and these women at Hull-House became models, models of independent, educated leadership of womanhood that could have a career, that could change the world. Florence was especially interested in dramatics.

Julia C. Lathrop, Hull-House resident and director of the Federal Children’s Bureau from 1912-1921. (Twenty Years at Hull-House).

The neighbors knew that Jane Addams  traveled abroad, that she spoke with important leaders in other countries, that she was for peace and opposed war, that she was for certain kinds of reforms in the United States. They had this idea of her and she was a model and she was real to them in the sense of showing, demonstrating how you could be a leader, a force in the public arena, a person of influence, who could encourage presidents and prime ministers to adopt certain programs. Julia Lathrop, went to Washington, D.C., to head the Children’s Bureau.  They were women who modeled women of service.

But it was not just Hull-House that demonstrated social activism and women participation in the social fabric of life. The women religious, who were the teaching sisters in the Roman Catholic schools in the neighborhood,  the women who were part of the congregational life of the parish churches, they had a degree of autonomy and agency that belies the fact that they were part of a religious institutional structure that was hierarchical, patriarchal, and in many ways conservative, and certainly not feminist. Yet, in the context of parish life and of the parochial schools that were set up and run independently of the male diocesan hierarchy, they had independence to some degree.

They were outspoken, independent women religious, like the guardian angel woman religious, Sister Filibert (Spizirri), who was a major supporter for the work that Florence and her activist women were doing in the neighborhood. Again, demonstrating a model of womanhood in a working class community that defied the stereotype of an obedient and passive nun who was under the thumb of the male clergy. Beyond this, or even before this, Florence had her mother and a grandmother and other mothers and grandmothers in the neighborhood who were part of the entrepreneurial journey that had taken them from Europe to America, to Chicago, to the neighborhood where they had found a way to own a store, a bit of property, to have made their way into the comfortable working class that lived in this near west side neighborhood of very mixed economic outcomes.

Genarosa Napolitano and Mary Marinello holding Rose Marinello at 13 months old, in the family grocery store on Polk Street. (Courtesy of Father Steven Giovangelo).

 

Property ownership, home ownership, retail proprietorship flourished and we can see how women worked outside the home in these family businesses, holding their babies with them. These were family businesses and the community supported this kind of entrepreneurship. They worked alongside their husbands.

One of the things we learn about the Giovangelo family is that Florence’s mother worked alongside her father in the tailor shop. She ironed, she worked alongside his craft as a tailor.  The household was integrated into an economic unit that allowed the children to be near their mother and father, to have the mother and father have a partnership that sustained the family business.

So women were working. Then of course there were the women in the neighborhood who were working in factories, were taking homework back to their apartments and  toiling,  on night shifts, were part of the trade unions.  They also were out on strike, were part of the picket lines. This was the working class neighborhood that Florence Scala inhabited.

There was no lack of female models of womanhood that projected engagement with the real world, engagement with public life, engagement with the economic realities of daily life and of the cultural and social institutions that made up the religious and cultural and ethnic activities of the neighborhood.  Florence and other working class women could readily see themselves in these women and dream of getting more education, of following new pathways and making decisions about their lives. What is interesting about the middle class version of working class life, which is the story of the men and women in the neighborhood that Jane Addams tells us, in her famous Twenty years at Hull-House and in other writings that she did in her lifetime, is how different her narrative about immigrant women in the neighborhood is from the one that I am describing. In the beginning, Jane Addams did not understand the immigrant women in her neighborhood very well. She thought of them as being isolated, disconnected, not just from the life of the city itself, but disconnected even from their own children who were going to become Americans very fast, very rapidly.

She saw that the Italian women, the Jewish women, Greek women, were not able to have the same relationships with their children that they had had prior to moving to America. They were disconnected, isolated. She tells a number of stories in Twenty Years at Hull-House that identify this situation (Jane Addams, “First Days At Hull-House,” Chapter 5 in Twenty Years  at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 110-111).

Women who don’t know much more than what they can learn from the small place they live in, the block they live in. They don’t know about the world outside. They can’t connect.

She sees them as she worries about them, she cares about them, but she does not see them as a source of strength, a source of activism. She does not see them as participating in a social life, she says they have no social life (Jane Addams, “Foreign-Born Children in the Primary Grades,” National Educational Association Journal of Proceeding and Addresses of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting Held at Milwaukee, Wis., July 6-9, 1897 (University of Chicago Press, 1897), 106).

She means not that they don’t go to parties and that kind of social life. She means they have no relationship to the social structure in society. This is a sociological observation on her part, that they’re not connected and even if they could vote at that time, they have no relationship to a public opinion.

A sense of civic-mindedness has to develop.  She would not look to them necessarily as being capable of developing the kind of leadership role in the community of a Florence Scala. It’s not surprising to me when I read how the director of Hull-House at the time of Florence’s major leadership in the neighborhood, a man by the name of Russell Ballard, is happy for what Florence is doing in her political life, but would not have imagined her doing anything like that or being capable because he has his perspective, like Jane Addams’, even though he has worked closely, as Jane Addams did, with the neighbors.

Ballard has even worked more closely with neighbors, in the 1950s when he was director, was involved with the Near West Side Planning Board. He has seen the capacity of the neighbors to be their own leaders and organizers. He still retains this stereotype of working-class life and of working-class women and is hard-pressed to see Florence as something more than an energetic and well-intentioned housewife.

Addams later developed a deeper understanding of what the women in the neighborhood were really all about and she began to see that their activities, which she could not have defined initially as being a form of social activism, were indeed examples of a challenge to the conditions of life and to the patriarchy. They were a form of resilience, resistance, and in many ways a kind of feminist consciousness that she had missed in her descriptions done earlier. This realization that the women were part of a social movement that had more in common with radical feminism than she had understood before was the revelation that she writes about in The Long Road of Women’s Memory in 1916, an important book that deserves more attention (Jane Addams, The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). In this, she began to understand that the working class women in the neighborhood were engaged in challenges to the system that oppressed them and their families at the same time that they were community builders developing cultural and social space for themselves and their group in very positive leadership roles.

By the 1940s, women in working-class neighborhoods were participating in movements to improve the schools, to deal with race relations, to provide daycare and healthcare for children, and to develop affordable housing. They were standing up for their rights and the rights of minorities in the state legislature and they were fighting for representation in the unions of the AFL that were traditionally resistant to women’s participation and the empowerment of women trade unionists. This was happening at the same time that other women were developing community life in suburbia, creating new religious institutions, joining PTAs, developing school boards, working for bond issues to pay for libraries, beginning to attack the major polluters who were poisoning the air and the food supply, worrying about nuclear war.

All of this was going on in this period and when we begin to examine working-class life in more complicated gendered ways and in the context of resistance to urban renewal as a form of social activism that was more than simply a reaction to the migration of blacks to northern cities, but had to do with a more complicated set of issues stemming from the failure of social reform to accept and value heterogeneous working-class districts as permanent parts of urban America.

Working class women were on a different timetable then their middle class sisters. Working class women continued to navigate family businesses, low paying jobs, and maintain  devotional and cultural affiliations and kinship relations locally and internationally.  This differed from the stereotype of the American suburban housewife after World War II.  This paper cannot begin to dislodge that stereotype.  Here we are focusing on the social activism of a working class woman and her allies in a period in which women’s activism had been considered minimal.

Rima Lunin Schultz is an academic historian who has written articles and books on Jane Addams, Chicago women in Catholic and Protestant faith traditions and the culture of urban elites. She serves as a member of the Project’s Advisory Board. 

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Guest post: Florence Giovangelo Scala, Hull-House and Neighborhood Planning

By Ann Keating.

Note by the author: Rima Lunin Schultz and I have been working for six years on a manuscript entitled: In the Shadow of Jane Addams: Planning in a Working-Class Neighborhood, 1889-1963.  We have encountered many interesting characters, including Florence Scala.  Scala is famous for leading the unsuccessful fight against construction of the University of Illinois in the early 1960s (she was in favor of a Chicago campus but not the Near West Side location).  Less well known was her strong connection to Hull-House and neighborhood planning efforts.

Giovangelo residence at 1030 West Taylor Street (Chicago Tribune, October 19, 1962).

Florence Giovangelo Scala was born on September 17, 1918, to Italian immigrants Alex and Teresa (Scardepane) Giovangelo. She grew up with her younger brothers in an apartment above her parents’ tailor shop at 1030 W. Taylor on Chicago’s Near West Side. The Giovangelo children attended local public schools but also participated in programs at nearby Holy Guardian Angel Catholic Church and at Hull-House both before and after the 1935 death of Jane Addams. The settlement offered the siblings a place to go for sports, recreation, arts, and crafts activities. They particularly enjoyed theater productions under the direction of Edith de Nancrede and Eri Hulbert. In the early 1930s, Florence and her brother Ernie developed a close relationship with Hulbert, the grandnephew of Jane Addams.  Scala remembered that they were “his kids,” and took many adventures with him.

Jane Addams and grand-nephew Eri Hulbert, August 1932 (Jane Addams Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago).

On her high school graduation, Scala worked for the Federal Theater Project (WPA) at Hull-House, contributed to a local newspaper, and worked for the draft board.  She took college classes, got married, and lived in the same building as her parents on Taylor Street just west of Hull-House. During and after World War II, Scala, her brother Ernie (after attending the University of Illinois), and a group of their neighbors saw the threats to their neighborhood from plans for major expressways and slum clearance.  They found a staunch ally in Eri Hulbert who worked tirelessly to create the Near West Side Planning Board with the support of Hull-House.   Scala remembered that Hulbert “torpedoed me into a big world of ideas—the search for knowledge and understanding of people. To me he was a teacher and a persistent pioneer in this new idea that the people themselves must participate in the planning of their own communities.”[1] [2]

While her brother took a paid position with the Near West Side Planning Board, Scala volunteered as secretary and treasurer of the group between 1949 and 1958. An inveterate dog walker, Scala often had a camera in hand, taking photographs of her changing neighborhood. Scala’s photographs became a critical part of the reframing of the neighborhood not as a slum, but as a vibrant working-class district that needed rehabilitation and improvements.[3] The Planning Board undertook a survey of the Near West Side. Anita Villarreal, a thirty-six-year-old mother of six and active voice in the local Mexican community, created a seven-foot map of the area, while Scala continued to take photographs “of the neighborhood, so that when we ha[d] our meetings, we could show these slides.” Driving the area streets in her large car, she took candid color shots of everyday life that showed a working-class neighborhood with manageable problems. She developed and framed fifty of these images to create an illustrated lecture about the Near West Side, which she delivered to dozens of groups around the neighborhood with her brother. The siblings were central to creating an alternative to the idea that the neighborhood was blighted.[4]

Florence Scala, J. Ross Humphreys, and William Deknatel study a land use map. (Private collection of Father Steve Giovangelo).

Scala’s photographs, Villareal’s map, and the raw survey data created a narrative to combat the idea that the whole neighborhood should be cleared. Instead, the Planning Board identified areas to be conserved, as well as some areas that would require slum clearance and redevelopment. That redevelopment could take several forms—private housing, public housing, industrial renewal, and commercial revitalization. Their ideas came together in the groundbreaking 1950 NWSPB plan where, for the first time, a working-class community had developed its own plan for rehabilitation and renewal.

What followed was nearly a decade of delays and disappointments with little forward movement on the 1950 Plan.  Eri Hulbert died in 1955, the same year that Mayor Richard J. Daley began his long tenure at City Hall. Downtown interests had the ear of the new mayor, and they wanted new middle-class redevelopment to ring the central business district. They advocated the mass clearance of the working-class neighborhood around Hull-House. When the University of Illinois went looking for a Chicago location, Mayor Daley and those downtown interests endorsed a Near West Side location.

Florence Scala, left, during overnight sit in at Mayor Richard J. Daley’s office on October 11, 1962. (Frederick Giese / Chicago Tribune).

It is at this juncture, in 1961, that Florence Scala became a household name in Chicago. Her long years with the Planning Board and at Hull-House prepared her for the challenge ahead.  Well-known in the Near West Side for her unswerving support of planning initiatives, her neighbors pressed her to become their spokesperson. Scala quickly helped organize the Harrison-Halsted Community Group (HHCG) to protest the proposed campus site.[5]  She targeted the City Council and Mayor Daley in marches and sit-ins at City Hall that were well covered in local newspapers, radio, and emerging TV news. In 1963, she ran as an independent campaign for alderman; she criticized Chicago’s political “machine” and hoped to defend the interests of ordinary voters in her district. Scala endured ridicule, threats, and several bombing attempts, but remained outspoken. But her campaign was not successfully and on March 5, 1963, the Hull-House trustees accepted $875,000.00 from the City of Chicago for their Near West Side properties.

Construction of the University of Illinois, Chicago campus, 1964 (College Archives, University of Illinois, Chicago).

Scala, who had for long years been a part of the Hull-House community, was bitter when the settlement turned its back on its neighbors. With the closure of Hull-House and the opening of the University of Illinois campus, the Near West Side was irrevocably changed. It was no longer a working-class neighborhood centered on industrial sites, religious institutions, local parks, and Hull-House. The university now shaped who lived and worked there. Scala lived in the same building at 1030 W. Taylor Street until her death in 2007, but her working-class neighborhood was gone.

Dr. Ann Keating is the Dr. C. Frederick Toenniges Professor of History at North Central College. She is a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Chicago, and author of several books on Chicago’s buildings and development. 

[1] Remarks by  Florence Giovangelo Scala,” Eri Hulbert Memorial Meeting, Hull House Garden, May 19, 1955, pgs. 19-20, Eri Baker Hulbert III Papers, Box 1, Folder 39

[2]Sandro Corso, “Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Leader,” Italian Americana, 37, 2 (Summer 2019), 100-101; Eastwood, Near West Side Stories, 140–141; and Florence Scala interview transcript, 4, Folder 69, Box 4, Hull-House Oral History Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago. See also “More Unpublished Reminiscences Steven Giovangelo,” January 29, 2014, in possession of Rima Schultz.

[3]“Florence Scala, 47” in Studs Terkel, Division Street: America (Pantheon Books, 1967), 5.

[4]Florence Scala quoted in Eastwood, Near West Side Stories, 154; NWSPB executive committee meeting, January 26, 1950, Box 39, Hull House Collection. See also Sandro Corso, “Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Leader,” Italian Americana, 37, 2 (Summer 2019), 99-118.

[5]Scala in Eastman, Near West Side Stories, 154.

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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.

Hull-House staffer Nicolette Malone working with actors for a dramatic performance (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois 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.

A Neighborhood Party (Hull-House Yearbook Photos, University of Illinois Chicago)

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.

Hull-House Circle Games

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.

[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).

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Presenting at the Chicago Women’s History Conference

Marilyn, Cathy, Jane, and Stacy at the Chicago Women’s History Conference, March 22, 2025.

The Jane Addams Papers Project represented at the Chicago Women’s History Conference this past Saturday. Cathy Moran Hajo, Stacy Lynn, and advisory board member Marilyn Fischer led a workshop devoted to the importance of Jane Addams, the digital edition, and how scholars and teachers can use it. Stacy talked about how influential Addams and the women of Hull-House were, and Cathy demonstrated the digital edition, while Marilyn discussed how she uses the digital edition to trace Addams’s word use in her three part book series about Addams as an evolutionary philosopher.

Our workshop was just one session in a day filled with really interesting work. The biggest challenge was choosing between them! And Jane Addams was everywhere! From the cardboard cutout at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s booth, to morning presentations by Sherryl Engstrom on Hull House Performs: A Description and Evaluative Study of the Performing Arts at Hull House, 1920-1937 and Fiona Maxwell on “We Women Would Rule the World of Politics”: Women’s Oratory and Activism at Chicago Settlement Houses, 1890-1920. In the afternoon, we delighted to Ann Keating and advisory board member Rima Lunin Schultz’s presentation, “Beyond the Second Wave: Working Class Women Activists and City Planning: Florence Scala and Chicago’s Near West Side.”

Keynote speaker Jamila Woods was inspiring and plenary session with Pinqy Ring and her amazing students ended with an emotional bang. What an amazing time.

 

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Hull House and Benny Goodman

 

Benny Goodman featured in the Billboard 1943 Music Yearbook [Billboard, 1943]
Because of Hull-House’s strong association with social and political causes, it can be easy for many to overlook the settlement house’s invaluable contributions to the arts. In bustling early 20th century Chicago, Hull-House served as a prime location for artistic expression and development. The experimental art classes of Dorothy Loeb at the settlement allowed students to express themselves in free and abstract ways. Enella Benedict provided nearly fifty years of service for Hull-House’s Art School, which served as an educational beacon. The Hull-House Boys’ Band, as it turns out, would have a hand in producing some of Chicago’s greatest musicians, the great Benny Goodman chiefly among them.

While most know Benny Goodman for defining an entire era of American music and helping to popularize jazz for mass audiences, his story begins like that of many other Chicagoans born during Hull-House’s heyday. “The King of Swing” was just one of twelve children born to Jewish immigrant parents. The family was defined by severe poverty, living in a slum neighborhood not too far from Hull-House. Goodman would later say “Judging from the neighborhood where I lived, if it hadn’t been for the clarinet, I might just as easily have been a gangster.”

This escape through music was exactly what Goodman’s father sought to provide. He enrolled ten year old Benny and his brothers Harry and Freddy in the Kehelah Jacob Synagogue’s music lessons, but this quickly fell through. Luckily for the Goodmans, the Hull-House Boys’ Band, returning after a hiatus during WWI, had just reopened its doors. 

Hull-House Boys’ Band
[Hull-House Year Book, 1925]
Excitedly playing in his new uniform, Goodman developed his musical skills under the direction of James Sylvester, the Boys’ Band’s leader and educator. Despite the band’s repertoire being far from the sounds of jazz that would soon envelop Goodman, he received additional lessons from Franz Schoepp, a well-respected Chicago clarinet teacher. Goodman quickly reached the advanced classes of Hull-House’s music program, and was subsequently chosen by Sylvester to play in his 124th Regiment Field Artillery band. This  marked a pivotal point in Goodman’s musical journey, as it allowed him to play with professional musicians and make money in the process.

As his musical abilities exponentially improved, Goodman also relished in Hull-House’s other activities. He was an enthusiastic member of the settlement’s summer camp at the Joseph Tilton Bowen Country Club, gladly taking part in the two-week retreat every summer with his brothers. The woodlands of Waukegan, Illinois were in stark contrast to the dingy conditions of the Chicago ghetto which the boys were exposed to for most of the year.

Goodman went on to work with the likes of Bix Beiderbecke and Ben Pollack, as his music career reached even greater heights. The “King of Swing” never forgot his experiences at Hull-House, however, even returning to the settlement in 1940 to perform a free concert despite grueling sciatica pain in his leg.

Ultimately, it’s clear that Hull-House provided an invaluable service to Benny Goodman’s life, supplying him with music, education and socialization at a time when the difficult social and economic conditions of Chicago may have led him on a much different path. It’s crucially important to remember that Goodman was just one of countless individuals who benefited from the settlement’s services, and that organizations like Hull-House continue to have a hand in producing some of the world’s most distinguished artists and leaders.

Sources: Benny Goodman – The Official Website of the King of Swing. “Biography.” Estate of Benny Goodman. Accessed April 17, 2024; Firestone, Ross. “Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman.” Norton, 1993; Wilson, John S. “BENNY GOODMAN, KING OF SWING, IS DEAD.” New York Times, June 14, 1986. p. 1; 

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Jane Addams on Television

During her lifetime, Jane Addams was famous throughout the United States and around the world. Known for Hull-House and as the leader of the American social settlement movement, respected for her wide-ranging reform activities, and beloved for her commitment to economic, political, and social justice for all, Addams became a household name. Reformers, educators, politicians, and the public looked to her for inspiration and for answers to the social and economic problems of the Progressive Era.

However, although she won the Nobel Peace Prize, published eleven books and hundreds of articles, and led consequential movements to restrict child labor, gain suffrage for women, improve the lives of immigrants, and change America ideas about poverty and the role of government in the protection of society’s most vulnerable people, she is grossly underappreciated today. I have stopped counting the number of people who ask me who Jane Addams was when I tell them I edit her papers and study her life. Although I take these opportunities to tell them about her or share a great story about her work, it makes me sad that Jane Addams is not a household name today. It is depressing that Americans can name the Kardashian sisters but have never heard of Jane Addams.

In our time of increasing inequality, rising hostility toward immigrants, and rampant civil discord, we need Jane Addams. We need inspirational figures who live or have lived in the service of others, not to themselves. Every day as I edit her papers, I am struck by how applicable the work and words of Jane Addams are today. Her dedication to equality and peace and her philosophical understanding of the connection of democracy and humanitarianism are still relevant, as is her talent to see need and suggest solutions, to mediate vast distances between cultures and ideas, and to inspire people to join her efforts to make a city, a country, or the world a better place. Her world view and ideas and her commitment to democracy are still imperative. As Charlene Haddock Seigfried writes: “The need to make democracy a vital way of life was a constant theme for Addams and one that challenges us yet again.”

The words of Jane Addams are still relevant:

Like what she wrote in defense of Russian Jews in Chicago in a 1908 article in Charities and the Commons: “In fact the more excited and irrational public opinion is, the more recklessly newspapers state mere surmises as facts and upon these surmises arouse unsubstantiated prejudices against certain immigrants, the more necessary it is that some body of people should be ready to put forward the spiritual and intellectual conditions of the foreign colony which is thus being made the subject of inaccurate surmises and unjust suspicion.”

Like the question she asked in 1913 of white Americans about what they had done or failed to do in pursuance of equality for Black Americans: “How far are we responsible that their civil rights are often rendered futile, their political action curtailed or frustrated, their equality before the law denied in fact, business and industrial opportunities withheld from them and, above all, that for twenty-five years they have been exposed to the black horrors of lynching?”

And the alarmed observation she shared in a speech at an American Sociological Society meeting in Chicago in 1919: “… for there is no doubt that at the present moment one finds in the United States the same manifestation of the world-wide tendency towards national dogmatism, the exaltation of blind patriotism above intelligent citizenship, as that evinced elsewhere.”

I do not meet historians of American history who are ignorant of her wide-ranging reform work. Illinois school children learn about Jane Addams when they study the state’s history; and Jane Addams is a popular subject for history students who participate in National History Day. The Jane Addams Papers Project is making her correspondence and writings freely available (Jane Addams Digital Edition) and has created Jane Addams lesson plans for high school teachers as well as AP history and National History Day resources (Jane Addams Exhibits). All of Jane Addams’s books are in print and/or available online. There is also a growing number of books about her life and her work, written from myriad perspectives, most notably Erik Schneiderhan’s The Size of Others’ Burdens: Barack Obama, Jane Addams, and the Politics of Helping Others (2015); Neil Lanctot’s The Approaching Storm: Roosevelt, Wilson, Addams and Their Clash over America’s Future (2021); and The Oxford Handbook of Jane Addams (2023).

There is no excuse to be ignorant of Jane Addams.

Especially now.

Because Jane Addams is now on television.

In October, WTTW, a PBS member television station in Chicago, premiered a Chicago Stories episode on Jane Addams. Jane Addams: Together We Rise examines the importance of Jane Addams in Chicago and of Hull-House as a laboratory for reform. It also chronicles the significance of Jane Addams as the leader of an incomparable group of women who became leaders in their own rights of a variety of Progressive Era organizations and activities to improve the lives of children, women, immigrants, and the working poor. When the producer Rachel Ruiz contacted the Jane Addams Papers Project about the documentary, we were thrilled and happy to assist. Our Project is based in New Jersey, but I live in Illinois and work remotely. It made sense for me to be the editor on camera for the film, although I was, at first, apprehensive.

Jane Addams was shy about having her picture taken, and I am shy about appearing on camera.

As an editor of historical documents, I spend much of my professional life in solitude, reading letters and speeches, straining over handwriting, solving the mysteries of vague references, and contextualizing the words of my subjects. I do not teach and have little interaction with students. And, since Jane Addams is under appreciated, there are few opportunities for me to interact with the general public. During the twenty years I edited Abraham Lincoln’s papers, I gave numerous public presentations every year, hosted a long parade of visiting scholars, attended untold Lincoln events, and appeared in several Lincoln documentaries. It was often a bit much, especially in February for Lincoln’s birthday. I cannot lie. I prefer the quiet and the anonymity of my life as an editor of the Jane Addams papers.

But because I cannot lie, I also have to admit it was pretty cool to have a film crew in my Jane-Addams-era bungalow and spend the day talking about Jane Addams. The novelty of the experience for me (and my two little dogs, one of whom made it into the film!) calmed my nerves about being under the blazing (unflattering) lights in front of a camera. Although it was terrifying a year later to preview the documentary the day before it aired, I am so proud and honored to have been part of it.

Jane Addams allowed photos of herself to be taken and dispersed for the good of her causes; and so, I was happy to participate in a documentary about her life for the good of our cause at the Jane Addams Papers Project: to make her work and her words accessible to a society that needs her now more than ever. Jane Addams’s life was consequential, her work was historically significant, and she still matters. Her extraordinary example of compassion, tolerance, civility, and the belief in the promise of democracy to lift up all people, is still relevant nearly eighty years after her death. We need American heroes right now, and few are more perfect for our troubled times than Jane Addams.

Therefore, dear readers who already know the worth of Jane Addams, go forth and spread the Jane Addams word. Watch the documentary, read her books, and tell your friends, family members, teachers, students, and community leaders to do the same.

Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

 

 

 

Books by Jane Addams (with links to first and early editions of them online)

Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902); reprinted with introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Newer Ideals of Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1907); reprinted with introduction by Berenice A. Carroll and Clinton F. Fink. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1909); reprinted with introduction by Allen F. Davis. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910); reprinted with original illustrations by Norah Hamilton and introduction and notes by James Hurt. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1912); reprinted with introduction by Katherine Joslin.  Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (New York: Macmillan, 1916); reprinted with introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Peace and Bread in Time of War (New York: Macmillan), 1922); reprint with introduction by Katherine Joslin. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House. (New York: Macmillan, 1930).

The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (New York: Macmillan, 1932).

My Friend, Julia Lathrop (New York: Macmillan, 1935); reprinted with introduction by Anne Firor Scott. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Forty Years at Hull-House; being “Twenty Years at Hull-House” and “The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House.” (New York: Macmillan, 1935).

Sources: Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Foreword,” in Patricia M. Sheilds, Maurice Hamington, and Joseph Soeters, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), xvi; Neil Lanctot, “Jane Addams and the Great War,” Jane Addams Papers Blog, Dec. 21, 2021; from the Jane Addams Digital Edition: Jane Addams, “Chicago Settlements and Social Unrest,” Charities and the Commons, 20 (May 2, 1908): 155-66; Jane Addams, “Has the Emancipation Act Been Nullified by National Indifference,” The Survey, 29 (Feb. 1, 1913): 565-66; Jane Addams, “Americanization,” Dec. 29, 1919.

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A Tale of Many Cultures: Clara Landsberg’s Experiences at Hull House

This article in its entirety was published in Volume 46, No. 3 Summer 2022 edition of Chicago Jewish History, a quarterly publication of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society and is being reprinted with the permission of the Society.

A Tale of Many Cultures:  Clara Landsberg’s Experiences at Hull House with Eastern European Jewish Immigrants and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Social Workers

by Cynthia Francis Gensheimer

Clara Landsberg, a Jewish-born teacher, social worker, and pacifist, lived at Hull House in the room directly adjacent to Jane Addams’s for roughly 20 years and made significant contributions to the Chicago settlement house. However, scholars have paid scant attention to her story until now, perhaps because she never sought prominence during her lifetime.[1] While researching her connection with Bryn Mawr College as part of a larger project on early Jewish women students at the Seven Sisters schools, I have discovered that shortly after graduating in 1897, Landsberg left Judaism to become Episcopalian. Afterward, she maintained ties with her influential Jewish parents but also became a member of the nation’s Protestant elite and of an international sisterhood of pacifists. Like many leading women intellectuals and social workers of her day, Landsberg lived with her lifelong partner—a woman—in a predominantly female world. This article will provide an overview of Landsberg’s biography, with a focus on her role at Hull House.

Clara was the daughter of a Jewish power couple: Rabbi Max Landsberg and Miriam (Isengarten) Landsberg, leading Jewish intellectuals and nationally known experts on charity administration, with 30 years of hands-on experience in helping the less fortunate in Rochester, New York.[2] Clara’s parents had close working relationships with luminaries Jewish and non-Jewish, including Chicago’s Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, Hannah Greenebaum Solomon, and Jane Addams.[3] Closer to home, Susan B. Anthony attended the Landsberg congregation’s annual interfaith Thanksgiving services and, in 1892, recommended Miriam Landsberg for a statewide position—although that position was ultimately filled by Anthony herself.[4] The Landsbergs helped lead efforts for social good in Rochester with their closest friends: the Unitarian minister William Gannett and his wife, Mary T. L. Gannett. Clara Landsberg followed her parents’ example in many ways.

Clara can be taken as a case study in the difficulties that many Jewish women of her generation would have faced in attempting to achieve the Landsbergs’ highest ideals. Clara graduated from the most intellectually rigorous women’s college on the East Coast and, through her partner, Margaret Hamilton, became a member of one of the country’s most elite Protestant families. Yet even after graduating from college and becoming Episcopalian, she was denied a job at a girls’ preparatory school because she was still considered Jewish. This discrimination against Jews, even those who had left the faith, was leveled against a young woman of eminent qualifications and impeccable manners. It belied her own parents’ fervent wish that Judaism should be considered only a religion, not a race, and that Jews should find full acceptance in American society.

Born in Rochester in 1873, Clara—and her two younger sisters, Rose and Grace—attended Miss Cruttenden’s School for Girls, which offered a rigorous college preparatory curriculum, but also equipped its students for lives of simple refinement. Although their social world was predominantly Jewish, they had Christian friends as well. At Rose’s confirmation, Rabbi Landsberg enjoined the teenagers coming of age in his Reform congregation to take a rational approach to religion and to determine their beliefs for themselves without feeling bound by tradition.[5] As the Landsberg children would have known, Susan B. Anthony and Mary T. L. Gannett had done exactly that by becoming Unitarians after growing up as Quakers.

At Bryn Mawr College, Clara met her future life partner: Margaret Hamilton, daughter of an upper-class WASP family in Fort Wayne, Indiana.[6] Clara also became acquainted with Margaret’s sisters: Alice Hamilton, who would later establish the field of industrial medicine, and Edith Hamilton, who would famously popularize classical Greek and Roman mythology.[7] Bryn Mawr, founded by Quakers, advertised itself as “pervaded by a simple and practical Christianity” and required daily chapel attendance.[8] Clara, the only Jew of the nearly 50 students in her graduating class, lived on campus and studied classical and modern languages, with a concentration in Latin and Greek.[9] After their 1897 graduation, Clara and Margaret studied abroad at the Sorbonne and the University of Munich.[10]

Around 1900, Clara Landsberg moved to Hull House, where she would room with Alice Hamilton for the next two decades.[11] By the time Clara arrived, three-quarters of Hull House’s clientele consisted of Jews from Chicago’s Near West Side and other neighborhoods.[12] These Jews—mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe—came to learn English, attend lectures and concerts, and participate in drama, music, and debate clubs.[13] Despite their apprehensions with respect to Christian proselytizing, they predominated among the 9,000 people who visited Hull House each week.[14] Clara Landsberg earned her living by teaching German and history at a local girls’ school; in her free time, she taught—and later supervised—the evening classes at Hull House.[15]

Jane Addams mentored Clara, who was initially in the unique position of being the only resident who had been born and raised Jewish. Jane Addams called her the “dean of our educational department”—in other words, supervisor of one of the settlement’s core activities.[16] In 1908, a paragraph in the Bryn Mawr Alumnæ Quarterly—likely written by Clara herself—reported that she was living at Hull House to familiarize herself with the problems of immigrants living in “crowded” quarters. Rather than describing her students as Catholic or Jewish, Clara identified them by their various nationalities: “Italian, Greek, Russian, Roumanian, Polish, Armenian, and German.”[17] She explained that they wanted to learn English not only to get good jobs, but also to “study subjects more or less remote from their daily work for much the same reasons that induce people of more fortunate neighborhoods to study Browning, Shakespeare, Ibsen, or Bernard Shaw.”[18] During her early years at Hull House, Clara introduced her students—primarily Eastern European Jews—to some of the classic works of English literature.[19] According to Jane Addams, Clara possessed “an unusual power” as a knowledgeable teacher with an unassuming, quiet presence.[20] In addition, Landsberg had “many friends among the poor people of the neighborhood who are devotedly attached to her.”[21] Two of those friends were Hilda Satt and Morris Levinson.

Hilda Satt’s life was transformed through her long association with the settlement and its residents. Hilda, who had first visited Hull House as a young teenager in 1895, later became a member of one of Clara Landsberg’s reading groups. Certain her mother would disapprove, Hilda had initially declined an Irish friend’s invitation to attend that year’s Hull House Christmas party. In her posthumously published autobiography, Hilda recalled her fear that she would be killed if she attended, because in Poland it had been dangerous for Jewish children to play outside on Christmas. She later wrote, “There were children and parents … from Russia, Poland, Italy, Germany, Ireland, England, and many other lands, but no one seemed to care where they had come from, or what religion they professed … I became a staunch American at this party.”[22]

In one of the first reading groups Clara conducted at Hull House, she ignited a love of English literature in Hilda, who spoke Yiddish at home and had left school after fifth grade to work days sewing shirt cuffs. In addition to the books Clara assigned, Hilda was soon reading “every book I could borrow.”[23] Only a few years earlier, Hilda’s English vocabulary had been so limited that she did not yet know the word “mushroom.” During a meal at Hull House, she had been served a mushroom omelet, of which she would later recall, “I was tortured with the question of whether the mushrooms were kosher.”[24] Soon, however, Hilda counted authors like Dickens and Louisa May Alcott among her friends. Months after meeting Hilda, Clara presented her with a Christmas gift of a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Hilda would later recall this as her fondest memory of “Miss Landsberg, … a fragile, ethereal, gentle woman … [who] opened new vistas in reading for me.”[25] With Clara Landsberg’s help, Hilda Satt became an exemplar of the path to Americanization and upward mobility that the settlement aimed to encourage.[26]

Another of Clara’s students, Morris Levinson, was, like many immigrants, eager to learn English and become an American citizen in the cultural as well as the political sense of the word. With Clara Landsberg as his mentor, he aspired to learn much more than basic skills of vocabulary, grammar, and usage.[27] Landsberg saved two letters that he wrote to her in 1905, while she was home in Rochester convalescing after a serious illness. In broken English, Morris expressed his concern that “Miss Landsberg” was “too sweet, and delicate, to be confind to bed of illness [sic],” reassured her that Ellen Gates Starr had taken him on as a pupil, and told her that he was studying a book she had given him to read: The Boys of 76, a collection of first-hand accounts of soldiers in the American Revolution:

I bolive I should have to know the history of this Country … I have resolved to read it over agan, so that I will remember everything better … Miss Landsberg, I bolive this history will make me a throught citesin.[28]

Morris also confided in Clara. He planned not to live solely seeking fun, “as a great many of people do,” but rather to “try to egicat [him]self as much as poseble” in order to “see the mining of this beautiful world and of the real uman life.”[29] Clara was not only a teacher but a role model for Morris Levinson: someone he admired and to whom he felt a deep sense of gratitude.

Although Hilda, Morris, and Clara had all been raised in Jewish homes, their similarities ended there. Clara’s highly educated, German-born parents spoke fluent English and shunned Yiddish. Like other Reform rabbis, Rabbi Landsberg jettisoned “superstitious forms and antiquated dogmas,” eliminating rituals he considered outmoded, such as Bar Mitzvah.[30] He endorsed the principles adopted by the Reform movement in its Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, but, like Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch of Chicago’s Sinai Congregation, he saw them as only the beginning rather than the end. In 1893, Rabbi Landsberg spoke in Chicago at the World Parliament of Religions, endorsing an expanded role for Jewish women in congregational life.[31]

Clara’s approach to Judaism was virtually the antithesis of that of many of the Jewish immigrants at Hull House. Her father decried Orthodoxy as well as Jewish nationalism. The Jewish immigrants—familiar and comfortable only with Orthodox Judaism—rejected Reform Judaism. Even those atheists, anarchists, and socialists who spurned all religion felt a connection to Yiddishkeit and Jewish peoplehood, concepts rejected by the Landsbergs and most Reform Jews. Did these immigrant Jews nonetheless recognize Clara Landsberg as ethnically Jewish, or did they see her as one of many Protestant residents of Hull House? Might they have accepted her precisely because they had no idea she was Jewish?

Addams and her cohort respected religious differences and tried hard to make Hull House welcoming to all.[32] Yet Jane Addams was motivated by her Protestant faith—especially by the literature and culture of social Christianity, which she described as a “renaissance of the early Christian humanitarianism … with a bent to express in social service and in terms of action the spirit of Christ.”[33] Addams has been criticized for failing to grasp that for many Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Judaism was far more than a religion. On the other hand, features of Hull House that Orthodox Jews would have found off-putting—the Chi-Rho cross Addams always wore, the Christian artwork on display, the lack of kosher food—would not have offended the most liberal Reform Jews such as Clara Landsberg or her mother, Miriam Landsberg.[34]

Miriam Landsberg, Hannah G. Solomon, and other German Jews mirrored mainstream America’s adulation of Addams. One of these Jewish admirers, Sara Hart, called Addams “the single, most influential citizen of my generation.”[35] Miriam Landsberg visited Hull House frequently and helped spearhead efforts among affluent Jews to establish a settlement in Rochester. In 1905, after spending several weeks at Hull House, she wrote: “I do not wonder that any one who has ever lived at Hull House cannot bear to go back to ordinary life.” She described the 21 residents (including her daughter Clara) as a “family” composed of “people of the finest minds” and life at Hull House as “simple, practical, … ideal.”[36]

Settlement work was popular among graduates of Bryn Mawr and similar colleges. Even so, it was not Clara’s first career choice. She and Margaret had wanted to teach at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, but two of the school’s most influential trustees, Mary Garrett and M. Carey Thomas (then president of Bryn Mawr College), refused to hire her because she was Jewish.[37] In 1899, Edith Hamilton (then headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School) wrote to M. Carey Thomas to apprise her of Clara’s conversion:

My sister has just written me that Miss Landsberg is about to become a member of the Episcopal church, and I have wondered whether this would make a difference in your and Miss Thomas’ opinion that we could not offer her a position because she is a Jewess.[38]

Clara Landsberg’s conversion made “not the least difference,” either to Mary Garrett or to M. Carey Thomas, as Garrett explained in her response to Edith Hamilton:

Our objection is one of policy and very few Jews employed in schools or colleges are Jews by religion; it never had occurred to us that Miss Landsberg was really an orthodox Jew. We are wholly unwilling to connect with the school in any capacity a Jew by race, and in view of our feeling of the financial unwisdom of such a step we think that Jews ought to be ruled out of court for the future in consideration of possible appointments.[39]

Yet Clara persisted. In 1900, M. Carey Thomas wrote to Mary Garrett saying, “The Jews enrage me. Is nothing in the world settled? Have Miss Landsberg & the Jews to come up perpetually. It is awfully bad policy.”[40]

Clara remained at Hull House until 1920, when a Quaker organization sponsored her to travel to Vienna to perform postwar humanitarian relief work. Two letters of recommendation finally qualified her as a WASP and (therefore) fit to represent the U.S. abroad. Jane Addams provided a ringing endorsement, and Mary T. L. Gannett was careful to specify: “As a matter of information, Miss Landsberg, during her college course joined the Episcopal Church – and as far as I know is still a loyal member of that Communion.”[41]

When Addams and her partner, Mary Rozet Smith, learned that Clara Landsberg had been accepted to the Quaker program, they both wrote letters of congratulation and farewell. Addams wrote, “I can’t bear to think of H.H. [Hull-House] next winter without either Alice [Hamilton] or yourself.”[42] Mary Rozet Smith wrote: “… no words will express … [our] sense of desolation … when we think of the year without you. … J.A. and I have decided that it is like losing a mother and a child at once. … With Alice in Boston and you in Vienna what will Hull-House be! It is too depressing to face.”[43]

Did Max and Miriam Landsberg know that their daughter was no longer Jewish? In the 1899 letter announcing Clara Landsberg’s conversion, Edith Hamilton had written, “Under the circumstances her family would prefer her not to be at home.”[44] Yet there is no proof that Clara’s parents did learn of her conversion. To all appearances, she maintained a positive relationship with her mother and father throughout their lives. In his final instructions to his children, Max Landsberg wrote, “[M]y life has been one of uniform happiness. The only serious trouble in my whole life has been the loss of my dear wife, your good mother.”[45]

As tolerant as Miriam was toward other beliefs, however, it is likely she would have cared deeply that Clara had left Judaism. At a national conference, as chair of the National Council of Jewish Women’s Committee on Religion, she worried that many German Jews were “given over entirely to materialism and indifference to all Jewish affairs.” She warned Jewish mothers that children raised without religion could “fall prey to … pious sharks … eager for souls.”[46] A few years later, she implored mothers to transmit a love of Judaism to their children “to preserve to our posterity that Judaism which gave Religion to the world.”[47] Despite Miriam’s fears, it is doubtful her daughter would have fallen prey to “pious sharks.” Rather, through exposure to Christianity at school and through her closest friends and role models, Clara rejected the most modern version of Judaism, one carefully crafted by her own parents, in favor of the Episcopal Church, which her father had criticized for what he saw as its strict adherence to ritual and creed.[48]

Part Two of this article will discuss Clara Landsberg’s becoming godmother to Jane Addams’ grandniece, Clara’s travels with Addams, and Clara’s own work as a pacifist, which was deeply informed by her connection with Addams. It will also document her retaining ties to her birth family, even as she joined the Hamilton family as well. And it will describe Landsberg’s trip to Germany with Alice Hamilton just after Hitler had come to power. In a letter to herself documenting the onset of the Holocaust, Landsberg would write, “I am a Jewess.”

Our thanks to Cynthia Francis Gensheimer and the Chicago Jewish History for allowing us to share this article with you.

[1] Even one of Clara Landsberg’s fellow residents, Francis Hackett, seemingly forgot her surname: “Miss Clara, of Bryn Mawr vintage, valiant, tense, souffrante, at once impatient and remorseful, indefatigable and worn-out.” Francis Hackett, “Hull-House: A Souvenir,” 100 Years at Hull-House, eds. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 69.

[2] Max Landsberg, born in Berlin in 1845, was a rabbi’s son and a protégé of Abraham Geiger. American Jewish Year Book 1903–1904, 72; http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1903_1904_3_SpecialArticles.pdf. When Miriam Landsberg, who was born in Hanover in 1847, died, the American Israelite called her death a “loss to American Jewry.” American Israelite, April 25, 1912. Peter Eisenstadt, Affirming the Covenant: A History of Temple B’rith Kodesh, Rochester, New York, 1848–1998 (Rochester: Temple B’rith Kodesh, 1999), ch. 2 and 3; Stuart E. Rosenberg, The Jewish Community in Rochester, 1843–1925 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954). At a 1910 meeting of the National Conference of Jewish Charities, during Miriam Landsberg’s term as vice-president, Jane Addams gave the opening address, and Rabbi Landsberg served as delegate representing the Jewish Orphan Asylum of Western New York, which he had co-founded and led for decades. Sixth Biennial Session of the National Conference of Jewish Charities in the United States Held in the City of St. Louis, May 17th to 19th, 1910 (Baltimore: Kohn & Pollock, 1910). American Israelite, February 5, 1914, 3. Rabbi Landsberg was elected president of the New York State Conference on Charities and Correction in 1910, when Miriam Landsberg was the outgoing vice-president. “Conference of Charities Holds Three Busy Sessions,” Democrat and Chronicle, November 17, 1910, 17.

[3] As chair of the Committee on Religion of the National Council of Jewish Women, Miriam Landsberg worked closely with Hannah G. Solomon, the organization’s founder. Susan B. Anthony wrote to Miriam Landsberg giving instructions for a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. and letting her know that Hannah G. Solomon and Sadie American had already arrived. Susan B. Anthony to Miriam Landsberg, February 12, 1899, University of Rochester Archives. After Hannah G. Solomon’s daughter, Helen, visited the Landsbergs in 1902, Rabbi Landsberg wrote to Hannah telling her what a “great treat” it had been to have her visit: “Helen reminds me so much of you, although she looks more like the best husband on earth.” He signed the letter, “With love for your husband and all the sisters within your reach.” Max Landsberg to Hannah G. Solomon, April 2, 1902. Helen Solomon Wellesley Correspondence, Hannah G. Solomon Family Collection, MC 749, American Jewish Archives. For the working relationship among Rabbi Hirsch, Hannah G. Solomon, and Jane Addams, see Rina Lunin Schultz, “Striving for Fellowship: Sinai’s Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch and Hull-House’s Jane Addams, A Not-So-Odd Couple,” unpublished manuscript, February 24, 2015.

[4] Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1898), 2:730. In 1891, Susan B. Anthony, Rabbi Landsberg, and Rev. William C. Gannett spoke at the annual Thanksgiving service. “The Benefits of Unrest,” Democrat and Chronicle, November 27, 1891, 6.

[5] “Rochester, N.Y.,” American Israelite, June 20, 1889, 2.

[6] For background on Bryn Mawr College, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) and Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

[7] For a significant biographical work on the nature of Clara Landsberg’s relationship with Margaret Hamilton, as well as Edith’s connection to Bryn Mawr College and the Bryn Mawr School, see Judith P. Hallett, “Edith Hamilton,” The Classical World  90, nos. 2/3, Six Women Classicists (November 1996–February 1997): 107–147.

[8] Bryn Mawr College Program 1892 (Philadelphia: Sherman & Co., 1892), 77.

[9] Clara Landsberg’s student transcript, Bryn Mawr College Archives. Religious affiliations researched by the author.

[10] Clara Landsberg’s alumna record, Bryn Mawr College Archives. Sandra L. Singer, Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-speaking Universities, 1868–1915 (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 75, 212.

[11] Presumably by the time that Clara Landsberg moved to Hull-House, she had become a member of the Episcopal church, but evidence surrounding the conversion is scanty, and that surrounding the exact dates of Clara Landsberg’s tenure at Hull-House is contradictory. For Alice Hamilton’s experience at Hull-House, see Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (Fairfax, Virginia: American Industrial Hygiene Association, 1995), ch. 4 and 5; Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3–4, 5, 115–136, 139–141, 144–152, 182, 244. Both Hamilton’s and Sicherman’s books are valuable resources that contain references to Clara Landsberg throughout.

[12] Hannah G. Solomon, introducing Jane Addams as a speaker at a national convention of the National Council of Jewish Women. “General Council of Hebrew Women Meets,” The Washington Times, December 3, 1902, 2.

[13] Philip Davis, “Educational Influences,” in The Russian Jew in the United States, ed. Charles S. Bernheimer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The John C. Winston Co., 1905), 217.

[14] Hull-House was not the only center serving immigrant Jews in its neighborhood. German Jews in Chicago organized their own institutions, and in fact Jane Addams mediated between the German and eastern European Jews when the Jewish-run Maxwell Street settlement was established a few blocks from Hull-House. The first organizational meeting, held at Hull-House in 1892, nearly disbanded due to the terrible arguing between the immigrants and the German Jews who convened the meeting. In an essay titled “A Resented Philanthropy,” one of the immigrants at the meeting later credited Addams with reestablishing civility. He said, “The ‘culture’ which was to emanate from the settlement and permeate all corners of the Ghetto was conspicuously absent from the heated discussion of the ‘enlightened’ benefactors.” In 1907, 150 people visited Hull-House weekly to lecture, teach, or supervise clubs. For Hull-House’s purpose, the names of its residents, and its weekly attendance, see Hull-House Year Book 1907, 5–6 (Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/hullhouseyearboo1906hull/page/38/mode/2up?q=jewish).

[15] Clara’s work evolved over time. She worked full-time at Hull-House for one year, but, finding that too difficult, she eventually taught at the University School for Girls (Miss Haire’s). Alice Hamilton to Agnes Hamilton, [mid-June? 1902], in Sicherman, Alice Hamilton, 142–143. Clara Landsberg’s alumna record, Bryn Mawr College.

[16] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 437 (A Celebration of Women Writers, ed. Mary Mark Ockerbloom, https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/addams/hullhouse/hullhouse.html).

[17] Italians came to predominate during Clara’s second decade. In 1902, the Chicago Tribune reported on a “Hebrew invasion” in the “crowded west side district”: “As soon as a Jewish family gets a foothold in a tenement other occupants vacate.” “Races Shift Like Sand,” Chicago Tribune, September 26, 1902, 13.

[18] Bryn Mawr Alumnæ Quarterly Vol. 1–2 1907–1909 (Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr Alumnæ Association, 1907–1909) (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/214021114.pdf).

[19] Francis Hackett wrote in his memoir: “Russian Jews and Jewesses came in great numbers to the classes at Hull House, and had special leanings toward literature” (72). Some English classes were composed entirely of Jews. Philip Davis, “Intellectual Influences,” in The Russian Jew in the United States, ed. Charles S. Bernheimer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The John C. Winston Co., 1905), 217.

[20] Jane Addams to Anita McCormick Blaine, June 29, 1901, Anita McCormick Blaine Correspondence and Papers, 1828–1958, Wisconsin Historical Society (Jane Addams Papers Project, https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/1015).

[21] Jane Addams, American Friends’ Service Committee (AFSC) letter of recommendation for Clara Landsberg, May 1, 1920. AFSC Archives.

[22] Hilda Satt Polacheck, I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 51–52, 66.

[23] Polacheck, I Came a Stranger, 66.

[24] Polacheck, I Came a Stranger, 66.

[25] Polacheck, I Came a Stranger, 66–67.

[26] In 1905, Hilda Satt took over supervision of the evening classes in Clara’s absence. In 1906–07, she taught beginners’ English at Hull-House. Jane Addams to Clara Landsberg, July 4, 1905, Clara Landsberg Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago Library (Jane Addams Papers Project, https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/840); Hull-House Year Book 1906–1907, 8.

[27] Addams noted the frequency with which young Jewish men who had patronized Hull-House also graduated from high school with help from their parents and then managed on their own to go on to college. Twenty Years at Hull-House, 346.

[28] Morris Levinson to Clara Landsberg, May 26, 1905, Additional Papers of the Hamilton Family, 1850–1994, box 13, 83-M175-94-M77, Schlesinger Library. Levinson’s letters are quoted as written, without corrections as to spelling, grammar, or usage.

[29] Morris Levinson to Clara Landsberg, n/d, Additional Papers of the Hamilton Family, 1850–1994, box 13, 83-M175-94-M77, Schlesinger Library.

[30] “Dr. Landsberg’s Closing Lecture,” Jewish Tidings, March 30, 1888, 19.

[31] Max Landsberg, “The Position of Woman Among the Jews,” World Parliament of Religions, Chicago, Illinois, 1893 (GoogleBooks, https://books.google.com/books?id=q2U-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA241&dq=%22max+landsberg%22+%22The+Position+of+Woman+among+the+Jews%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-3aifgMLPAhUk_4MKHRbLCOIQ6AEIIDAA#v=onepage&q=%22max%20landsberg%22%20%22The%20Position%20of%20Woman%20among%20the%20Jews%22&f=false). When virtually no other rabbi in America would perform an interfaith marriage, both Hirsch and Landsberg did so. Rosenberg, The Jewish Community in Rochester, 93–94. Tobias Brinkmann, Sundays at Sinai (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 136.

[32] In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams explained that over time, she and the other residents abandoned Protestant evening prayer, and their demographic composition at least in part reflected the make-up of the neighborhood, including Catholics and Jews, “dissenters and a few agnostics.” Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 448–449. Rivka Shpak Lissak has claimed that although many traditional Jews avoided Hull-House, it “had a closer relationship with the marginal Jewish elements, the assimilationists and the radicals.” Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 80.

[33] Rima Lunin Schultz wrote: “For Addams, who affixed a Chi-Rho Cross to her bodice, her work at Hull-House was religious; yet by establishing her settlement as an independent association without ties to any religious organization, university, or other agency, and by not requiring religious worship or religious education, she set out to spread a Christian humanism that she envisioned as cosmopolitan and democratic, inclusive and tolerant. Did this mean that she resolved to exclude religious ideas from Hull-House? I would argue that this has been an area of misunderstanding about Addams’s intentions.” Rina Lunin Schultz, “Jane Addams, Apotheosis of Social Christianity,” Church History 84, no. 1 (March 2015): 207.

[34] Many eastern European Jewish immigrants were strongly attached to Jewish culture and Zionism, even as they lost their connection to Jewish worship. Jane Addams wanted children of immigrants to respect their parents, yet she also saw that many old customs and religious traditions made no sense to the younger generation and in some cases held them back. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 247–248; Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives, 80–94. In contrast, on a family trip to Germany when Clara was ten years old, the Landsbergs had appreciated the aesthetic value of medieval Christian architecture such as the Hildesheim cathedral. Clara Landsberg, “Leaves from my Diary,” 1887, 1–4, Additional Papers of the Hamilton Family, 1850–1994, 83-M175-94-M77, box 13, folder 81, Schlesinger Library.

[35] Sara Hart wrote of Jane Addams, “It was my pleasure to know her intimately for more than thirty years.” Sara L. Hart, The Pleasure is Mine: An Autobiography (Chicago, Illinois: Valentine-Newman, 1947), 82. Hannah G. Solomon considered Jane Addams a leader of “all humanity” and  “the greatest woman of our century.” Jane Addams inspired Jewish women at the NCJW’s third biennial in 1902, which Solomon attended as president and Miriam Landsberg as vice-president (Hannah G. Solomon, “Council Welfare Work Forty Years Ago and Today,” 4, n/d, Hannah G. Solomon Collection, Library of Congress, box 11, folder 5).

[36] “Sings Praises of Hull House,” Democrat and Chronicle, March 17, 1905, 10.

[37] To understand Mary Elizabeth Garrett and the early history of Bryn Mawr School, see Kathleen Waters Sander, Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2008).

[38] Edith Hamilton to Mary Garrett, April 18, 1899, Bryn Mawr College Archives, Papers of M. Carey Thomas, reel 214.

[39] I am indebted to Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, who cites this letter and gives a good overview of M. Carey Thomas’s antisemitism in M. Carey Thomas, 230–32, 267, 486. Mary Garrett to Edith Hamilton, April 24, 1899, Bryn Mawr College Archives, Papers of M. Carey Thomas, reel 214.

[40] M. Carey Thomas to Mary Garrett, September 26, 1900, Bryn Mawr College Archives, Papers of M. Carey Thomas, reel 23, nos. 37–39.

[41] Mary T. L. Gannett, letter of recommendation, May 4, 1920, Clara Landsberg’s personnel file, AFSC Archives.

[42] Jane Addams to Clara Landsberg, August 7, 1920, Hamilton Family Collection, 84-M210, box 1, folder 7, Schlesinger Library. Alice Hamilton had just been appointed the first woman professor at Harvard’s School of Medicine.

[43] Mary Rozet Smith to Clara Landsberg, August 7, 1920, Hamilton Family Collection, 84-M210, box 1, folder 7, Schlesinger Library.

[44] Edith Hamilton to Mary Garrett, April 18, 1899.

[45] Max Landsberg to his children, January 16, 1918, Max Landsberg SC 6602, American Jewish Archives.

[46] “The Council’s Report on ‘Religion,’ ” The Reform Advocate, March 24, 1900, 167 (The National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/?a=d&d=refadv19000324-01.1.11&e=——-en-20–1–img-txIN%7ctxTI-%22miriam+landsberg%22————-1).

[47] Miriam Landsberg, “Report of Committee on Religion,” The Reform Advocate, January 3, 1903, 452 (The National Library of Israel, https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/refadv/1903/01/03/01/article/29/?srpos=12&e=——190-en-20–1–img-txIN%7ctxTI-landsberg+committee+on+religion————-1).

[48] Max Landsberg criticized Episcopalians for requiring members to “believe in the forty-nine articles of faith” and Presbyterians for the Westminster catechism. “What is Judaism?” Democrat and Chronicle, November 22, 1899, 11. The Hamilton sisters, whose family Clara Landsberg joined, had been reared in the Presbyterian congregation founded by their grandfather, but, as children, they preferred the small Episcopal church on Mackinac Island, where they spent their summers. For a thorough discussion of the Hamilton sisters’ religious upbringing, see The Education of Alice Hamilton, eds. Matthew C. Ringenberg, William C. Ringenberg, and Joseph D. Brain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), esp. 13–14, 23–24. For a discussion of religion among the residents of Hull-House, see Eleanor J. Stebner, The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

 

 

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Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks –An Audio Musical

Exciting news! On Thursday, August 26 at 8 pm CST, Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks, an audio musical  written and composed by Evanston playwright Kristin Lems, will open to the public at the  website www.SaintJanePlay.com. The two-hour musical play, which can be enjoyed in one  sitting or in four separate installments, is free, asking for a voluntary donation with a suggested  sliding scale. After the site goes live, listeners may attend the show any time on demand.

Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks is set in Chicago in the decade of the 1893 World’s  Fair. It is about the friendship between Hull House founder Jane Addams and Nellie Wicks,  Kristin’s great grandmother, in the years 1890-1905, during the early years of Hull House.

Prize-winning Chicago dramatist Douglas Post is the director, with musical direction by  Diana Lawrence and mixing and editing by Dan Dietrich. Piano arrangements and performances were created by Tom Cortese of Champaign, Illinois.

The cast consists of well-known area actors and singers, including Kathy Cowan as Jane  Addams, Rebecca Keeshin as Nellie Wicks, Monica Szaflik as Ellen Gates Starr, Maddie Sachs  as Julia Lathrop, Patrick Byrnes as George Wicks and John Dewey, Frankie Leo Bennett as Gene  Wicks, John B. Leen as Jim Wicks and Sol Friedman, Kingsley Day as Richard Crane, and  Therese Harrold as Addie Wicks. The professional, non-equity cast was auditioned and selected  in December 2020 and recorded in the early months of 2021.

The “audio musical” is a new genre. The singer-actors rehearse their parts together on  zoom, but record and upload them individually to a single destination without being in a  recording studio. Then, the scenes and songs are reviewed, mixed, and edited by the director and  recording engineer. The final product is similar to an audiobook or radio play, but there are also  songs, in this case, 17 original songs including “The Hull House Rag,” “Straight to Hell in Chicago,” and other memorable numbers. The new genre enables artists to release entertaining  musical theatre work while keeping both performers and audience safe.

The musical will open on Women’s Equality Day, August 26, to celebrate the 101st anniversary of American women winning the right to vote. Jane Addams was active in the  suffrage movement 10 years after the time of the play, along with many activist women of Hull  House. Two key organizers, Ellen Gates Starr and Julia Lathrop, are characters with key roles in  the show.

Kristin Lems has won many accolades as a writer, composer, and performing artist, but  this is her first full-length musical. Lems was inspired by stories about the unusual friendship between the two women, told by her mother, musician Carol Lems-Dworkin (1924-2019), and  along with primary materials, including a handwritten diary by Nellie Wicks, two full length  unpublished novels written by Nellie’s eldest daughters, recorded oral histories, and an  autographed picture given to Nellie by Jane Addams shortly before Addams died. Lems also  researched Jane Addams, Hull House, and Chicago history with a 2017 sabbatical from her  employer, National Louis University, where she is a professor.

Many other outstanding talents helped design the trailer, iconic poster, website, video  product, and script, and many people deserve thanks and praise for moving this ambitious project forward to this day. For information about the cast, members of the pre-production, production,  or post-production team, or to contact Kristin Lems, please email saintjane2021@gmail.com.

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Dr. Harriet Rice: First Black Resident at Hull-House

Dr. Harriet Rice (1915)

In 1893, an African-American woman with an extraordinary academic background came to live at Hull-House, and she spent a decade of her life in residence at the famous social settlement in Chicago. Her story is not a tale of realizing dreams against all odds. It is not a tale of American exceptionalism, illustrative of the possibilities of equality in a democracy. It is certainly no fairytale. It is, instead, a history of realities. It is a history of human experience informed by the harsh constraints of race and gender in the post-Reconstruction United States. Hull-House was remarkably progressive during the nadir of American race relations, and it provided a space for women to thrive. However, it was not a protective bubble against the prejudices of white America. And the city of Chicago, strictly ordered as it was by race and ethnicity and class, even in many forward-thinking reform organizations, could be cold and bigoted and cruel.

When Harriet Rice, a 27-year-old physician, arrived at Hull-House in the year of Chicago’s great and hopeful Columbian Exposition, she understood it was not going to be easy. She was the first and only African-American resident at the Hull-House settlement, which was located in an impoverished neighborhood of white immigrants, many of whom measured their success and status in juxtaposition with that of African Americans, the city’s lowest caste. Dr. Rice was a smart, ambitious Black woman at a time when society relegated women and people of color to subordinate roles. She knew that a majority of the population in the United States believed Black people were inferior. She knew women had to work harder than their male counterparts to make professional careers for themselves. But she was not looking for easy. She was used to hard work and struggle. She had always chosen challenging paths.

Born in 1866 in Newport, RI, Harriet Alleyne Rice was the daughter of a steamship steward who prospered enough to own a home and to send his children to college. Harriet was a bright and curious girl and a gifted student, and she dreamed of following the career path of an older brother and becoming a doctor. In 1887, she became the first African-American woman to graduate from Wellesley College, and she went straight on to the University of Michigan to join an early cadre of female, Black medical students there. Unfortunately, a health crisis brought on by a debilitating injury derailed her medical studies, but after enduring two operations and a lengthy convalescence, she entered the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. After earning her medical degree in 1891, she completed a year of post-graduate training at the prestigious New England Hospital for Women and Children. Dr. Rice was in a special class of African-American women, only one of 115 who held medical degrees by 1896.

When Dr. Rice settled in Chicago, her plan was to practice medicine, and on Sep. 8, 1893, the Illinois State Board of Health issued her a certificate entitling her to practice medicine and surgery in the state. Yet finding work proved difficult. Most hospitals in the United States did not grant privileges to African-American doctors, and Provident Hospital, established in 1891 on Chicago’s South Side, was the only African-American hospital in the city. As well, many white patients rejected medical treatment from Black doctors, and by 1900 there were only 30,150 African-Americans in Chicago and fewer still who could afford to pay for medical visits and treatments. Rice, who was one of only forty-five African-American physicians in Chicago, faced not only racial prejudice but gendered prejudice, as well. Many male physicians at that time barred women physicians from hospitals, and gender discrimination in all areas of the medical profession was commonplace.

We can only speculate about Rice’s hopes and dreams for herself in Chicago, and the particulars of her decision to live at Hull-House are unknown. But it is likely that Hull-House offered a refuge and an agreeable and affordable housing option. For Black Chicagoans housing was expensive and limited, confined almost exclusively to the city’s “Black Belt,” and much of the housing available to the city’s Black residents was inferior in condition and inconveniently located. There was a growing middle-class in Chicago and a prosperous Black community, but Rice was not possessed of standing and wealth when she arrived in the city seeking to build a better life for herself. When she moved into Hull-House, she might have already been feeling discouraged about her prospects, despite the fact that Jane Addams wanted her to join the settlement and might have even recruited her. Other residents were supportive of Rice, too. Mary Rozet Smith funded a fellowship with a small stipend for her. Florence Kelley shared a room with her at the settlement and, no doubt, offered her advice. And Julia Lathrop helped Rice make contacts in Chicago and counseled her when her medical practice floundered.

At first, Rice settled in comfortably and made friends. Madeleine Wallin, who was also a new resident, found Rice “one of the most lady-like and unobjectionable people” at the settlement. Jane Addams assigned Rice to help establish a medical clinic and dispensary at Hull-House, and when the leading physician, a white woman, left the settlement, Addams was hopeful that Rice would assume responsibility for the operation. However, Rice was either uninterested in dispensing medical care to the poor or, more likely, she was unwilling to accept poor treatment by Hull-House’s clientele of white immigrants, many of whom likely mistrusted the young Black doctor. Black Chicagoans would have been accepting of Dr. Rice, but most of the city’s Black residents lived too far from Hull-House to make use of the dispensary or other of the settlements programs and services.

In January 1895, Addams wrote to Mary Smith: “Dr Rice has an awful cold which has hung on for weeks and is perfectly miserable, she is also desperate about her financial situation, she has no practice save the Jane Club and H. H. Sister Lathrop has taken her life in her hand and is trying to induce her to go to the colored hospital. She said that I might find her in fragments upon my return.”

The following month, Addams updated Smith again: “I forgot to mention Dr Rice in my long screed this morning. She has a wretched cold—has lost her voice for weeks and is altogether doing miserably. I do not know what do for her or about her. She is still working on the library but by the time she pays her room rent and her coal probably does not eat enough. She has not the settlement spirit (if there is such a thing) and makes Miss [Annie] Fryar and indeed the rest of us, indignant by her utter refusal to do anything for the sick neighbors even when they are old friends of the House. I am constantly perplexed about her.”

And later in the month, Addams wrote: “Dr Rice’s cold is no better but she is much more human and charming.”

Rice struggled to establish a private medical practice, and she was struggling to find purpose at the settlement, too. Addams arranged for a $25 monthly stipend for Rice to work in the Hull-House branch of the Chicago Public Library, and then Rice ran the Hull-House Dispensary until it closed in June 1896. After that she took a short-term, paid position for the Illinois Board of Charities to organize records of Cook County’s public institutions serving the poor. From 1897-1898, Rice was the only doctor at the Chicago Maternity Hospital and Training School for Nursery Maids.

Jane Addams may have been right. Perhaps Rice did not have the “settlement spirit,” certainly other residents of Hull-House over the years failed to find the spirit in their own hearts. In Rice’s defense, however, she possessed the skills and education to be a physician, and she wanted to be a physician. Running a dispensary for the poor did not fully utilize her talents, and it is easy to imagine the racial hostility she experienced in that role. Addams liked Rice and felt empathy for her financial difficulties and ill health, but whereas she could accuse Rice of lacking the “settlement spirit,” Addams herself seemed to have lacked the spirit of sympathy for the frustrations Rice experienced. Addams likely believed that having Rice at the settlement was evidence of her own open-mindedness and racial equality at Hull-House. However, she either ignored or failed to fully understand Rice’s unique challenges from the standpoint of race. Hull-House was a safe environment for women, but in the early decades the settlement was probably not always a safe environment for a woman of color.

The truth of the matter is clear. Race and racism played a significant role in the experience of African-Americans, and Rice was not immune. Though she had the mental capacity and the training for a lucrative career in medicine, the color of her skin had more bearing on her chances for professional and financial success than did her preparedness for medical work. As a result, since arriving in Chicago, Rice had had to worry about money. All Hull-House residents were required to contribute to the settlement, to have a purpose, to pull their weight. They were also required to cover their expenses, although Hull-House was an affordable housing option for most of its residents. Rice’s attempt to establish a private medical practice was failing, and she was having difficulty making ends meet.

She also suffered poor physical health, perhaps exacerbated by the stress of persistent discrimination. In 1899, an unknown illness became serious enough that she moved back home to Newport to have another surgery and endure another long convalescence. There is no record of how Jane Addams or any of the other residents felt about Rice’s departure. However, when she returned to Chicago in 1901, she went back to Hull-House.

In July 1901, Jane Addams wrote Mary Smith: “The Bureau of Charities has absolutely no money and we have been more of a relief bureau than any thing else — but — [though] relief was needed Dr Rice is most amiable and charming and likes the work.”

Jane Addams still wanted Rice at Hull-House and, perhaps, felt an obligation to her. In 1902, Rice took a flat in the new apartment building at Hull-House, her salary as postmistress at the settlement’s Post Office allowing her to afford the flat and take her meals in the settlement’s Coffee House. From 1902-1904, Rice’s circumstances were secure, but perhaps she was restless or disappointed that a career in medicine was eluding her. After serving briefly as the Hull-House cashier, Rice left the settlement for good in 1904. If she kept in touch with Addams in the early years after her departure, no correspondence survives to document it. If she had hard feelings for the settlement, we cannot know, although later evidence suggests that Rice did not look upon her years in Chicago as successful, nor particularly pleasant ones.

WWI Medal of French Gratitude Image Courtesy of the American Medical Women’s Association.

We don’t know much about what happened to Rice after she left Hull-House, but there is evidence she continued to be restless. In 1910 she was an assistant in a Boston dispensary’s pathology laboratory, and sometime after that moved to France to live with her brother. She was in Europe when war broke out, and she was one of two African-American women who served in WWI, finally getting a real chance to practice medicine. Rice worked in a French military hospital for most of the war. In 1919, she was awarded the bronze medal of French gratitude, the Reconnaissance Française, for her meritorious medical service. Her WWI years were “happy years,” perhaps the most professionally fulfilling years of her life, years that proved to herself and illustrate for the historical record Dr. Rice’s capacity to be an skilled physician.

After the war, Rice returned home to Newport, where she lived with her sister, and she made another attempt at private medical practice. She also returned to the same old discriminatory circumstances she had faced in the past. When her sister died in 1925, Rice wrote to Wellesley classmates to share the bad news and some of her personal disappointments, as well. “I’m a lonely wonderer on the face of earth, without friends, without home, or settled employment of any kind,” she wrote. She was 61 years old and feeling lost. She was also, she added, “looking forward without hope, and backward only, with regret.”

In December 1928, when she was living in Boston, Rice wrote to Jane Addams, and her letter is a heartbreaking illustration of her sorrows. Having read in the newspaper that Addams had been in town for a lecture, she wrote: “I do wish I might have seen you. I should have been so glad to see you once more—although I hardly imagine that you would have been the least glad to see me. I’ve never forgotten once hearing a southern doctor tell about seeing again his old “colored Mammy” and how glad she was to see him; but on his side there seemed to be nothing.”

That sentence of the letter is replete with bitterness, but there is some tenderness in the letter, as well. Rice alluded to a less than amiable final departure from Hull-House, but she was hopeful that the years had softened any hurt there may have been between her and Addams, and also between her and Mary Rozet Smith, who had sponsored her residency at Hull-House all those years ago. “So,” Rice concluded, “please do let me wish yourself, and Miss Mary and Miss Eleanor [Smith] all the best wishes of the Christmas tide—health and good cheer and all the happiness possible in this dreadful world.”

Despite her accomplishments, which were unique and impressive, Rice saw the world through the lens of disappointment. The “dreadful” world had been for her, in large part, cold and bigoted and cruel. The character of race was a living, breathing entity, shaping her life and drawing her experiences; and it is hard to blame her for feeling frustrated and wounded. As for Jane Addams, it is impossible to know what she would have said to Rice to counter her negative narrative or to console her. If she replied to Rice, the letter is lost. But I suspect Addams, who was usually keen to reconnect and keep in touch with previous Hull-House residents, would have taken the time to see her old colleague in Boston had Rice requested a meeting when she was in town.

Between 1928 and 1933, Rice worked in Philadelphia and later in New York City, where she found employment in a laboratory at the Columbia Medical Center. Apparently, her financial circumstances were often precarious in those years. In June 1933, she wrote Mary Rozet Smith for help. In America’s Great Depression, her position at Columbia was in jeopardy. She hated to beg for work, but she had no choice. “This is a man’s world and they won’t let a woman get farther than they can help—or hinder.”

In 1935, Rice received a questionnaire sent to Wellesley graduates. Many of the questions pertained to marriage and family and did not pertain to her, but one of the questions provoked a passionate response. To the question “Have you any handicap, physical or other, which has been a determining factor of in your activity,” she wrote: “Yes! I’m colored which is worse than any crime in this God blessed Christian Country!”

Racial prejudice and discrimination had not subsided in the 1930s. Jim Crow still reigned in the South, “Sundown Towns” restricted the movements of African Americans in the Midwest, and most northern cities were increasingly segregated. There is little evidence of Rice’s later years, but at some point she settled in West Somerville, MA, outside of Boston to live in retirement. She was living there when she died at the age of 92 on May 24, 1958. Although she faced unimaginable difficulties, she had accomplished much in her long life, including a few historical firsts as an African-American woman. Before she died, I hope she gave herself the credit she deserved for reaching beyond what the society in which she lived proscribed for her. I suspect at the end of her life, however, she was still disappointed about the ways in which her country failed her. And it makes me angry that in death she suffered one final indignity, being buried in a public cemetery in her hometown of Newport in the area designated for African Americans.

I was born exactly 100 years after Dr. Rice, and I wish I could tell her things are different now. And they are different; and, in many ways, they are better. There are far fewer obstacles today for bright and curious little girls like Harriet had been, and Black women have greater access to college and professional careers than those who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Still, I suspect, Rice would be disappointed to learn that only 36 percent of doctors today are women, and less than 3 percent are Black women.

By Stacy Lynn,
Associate Editor

Sources: Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 3-15, 23-30, 57, 97, 103; Irving Cutler, Chicago: Metropolis of the Mid-Continent, 4th ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 156-60; Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890-1945,” in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol Dubois, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 214-41; Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954); Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 740-42; Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 387-88; Ann Oakley, Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880-1920 (Chicago: Policy Press, c/o University of Chicago, 2018), 53; Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 12, 14; Kimberly Jensen, “Uncle Sam’s Loyal Nieces: American Medical Women, Citizenship, and War Service in World War I,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 67 (Winter 1993): 680; “African Americans,” Encyclopedia of Chicago;  Florence Kelley to Nicholas Kelley, June 29, 1902, transcribed in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Beverly Wilson Palmer, eds., The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869-1931 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 113; 1910 U.S. Federal Census; 1920 U.S. Federal Census; Maria Aspan, “Black Women Account for Less than 3% of U.S. Doctors,” Fortune, Aug. 9, 2020; “New Physicians for Illinois,” Chicago Tribune, Sep. 9, 1893, p. 4; “George Addison Rice,” Fall River (MA) Evening News, Mar. 10, 1894, p. 4; “New England News in Tabloid Form,” Newport (RI) Mercury, Sep. 24, 1921, p. 5; “Dr. Harriet Rice, 92, Native of Newport,” Newport (RI) Daily News, May 27, 1958, p. 2; Selected Papers of Jane Addams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 3:233n2, 3:241, 3:270n24, 3:454n6; 415n21; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Jan. 15, 1895, in Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:411; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Feb. 3, 1895, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm (JAPM) 2:1656-58; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Feb. 24, 1895, JAPM, 2:1673; Harriet Rice to Jane Addams, Dec. 7, 1928, JAPM, 20:608; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, July 19, 1901; Harriet A. Rice to Anita McCormick Blaine, Aug. 31, 1904, both in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

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Segregation At Hull-House: A Closer Look

In June, Addams biographer and Project Advisory Board member Lucy Knight got in touch with a query regarding a claim that Hull-House was a segregated space until the 1930s. The claim first made by Thomas Lee Philpott in his 1978 work: The Slum and the Ghetto: Housing Reform and Neighborhood Work in Chicago, 1880-1930.  It  was repeated by Khalil Gibran Muhammed’s Condemnation of Blackness (2010), and then repeated by me in a 2015 blog post reporting on Khalil Muhammed’s talk at Ramapo College. Lucy wanted to know more, because the claim had begun appearing all over the web. Since then she has gathered evidence that refutes the statement.

I wrote that blog post a few weeks after launching the project at Ramapo and did not question the statement. I probably should have, but assumed that given the time and the place it was likely true. Today I want to give the question a little more light and attention.

There is no smoking gun document — one in which a policy of segregation was clearly established. Without that it can be extremely difficult to prove whether or not African-Americans were welcome at Hull-House or in its programs and sponsored clubs. A majority of the records of Hull-House have not survived, which makes it unlikely that we will ever be able to definitively confirm or debunk the statement.

There are a couple of layers to the question. First, was Hull-House itself a segregated space? To that question, the answer is clear. It was not.  Dr. Harriet Alleyne Rice (1866-1958), a Black physician and graduate of Wellesley College, started working at Hull House as early as  1893, working with the Hull-House branch of the Chicago Bureau of Charities and tending to the poor.

Addams invited Black speakers to Hull-House, including prominent figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who gave the speech “The Souls of Black Folk” at Hull-House on Lincoln’s birthday 1907 (Hull-House Year Book, 1906-1907). A year earlier, Atlanta newspaperman J. Max Barber spoke about the Atlanta race riot to a Hull House “audience mostly composed of negroes.” (Chicago Tribune, October 8, 190-6,. p. 3).  Addams invited  Ida B. Wells to visit and dine at Hull-House. And in 1912, Addams hosted a meeting of the interracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on the Hull-House grounds.

Hull-House hosted a reception for the delegates of the NAACP meeting in Chicago on April 30, 1912.

A more complicated question was whether Hull-House’s clubs and groups welcomed people of all races. Few if any spaces in Chicago were integrated during Jane Addams’s life.  By 1910, the vast majority of African-Americans lived in Chicago’s South Side in what was known as the “Black Belt.” They formed their own organizations to empower their communities, much as other ethnic and religious groups did. African-Americans who came to Chicago during the Great Migration found opportunity, but also oppression.

Hull-House was located in the Near West Side, a overcrowded community that featured a wide range of European immigrants. The area was filled with ever changing languages and customs as Irish, German, Czech, and French immigrants were replaced by Jews from Russia and Poland, Italians and Greeks. In 1895, Hull-House workers surveyed the area showing the cultural (if not racial) diversity. It was not until the 1930s and 1940s that African-Americans and Mexican became a more significant presence in Hull-House’s neighborhood.

Nationalities Map of Polk Street to 12th Street in the Near West Side (Hull House Maps and Papers, 1895).

As a neighborhood-based settlement, Hull-House represented its surroundings, which meant that in its early years, the majority of its clientele were white immigrants. Photographs of early activities show this clearly.

A group of toddlers outside Hull-House in the 1890s. At this point the neighborhood was predominately comprised of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. (Seven Settlement Houses — Database of Photos, University of Illinois at Chicago)

Many of clubs and associations that operated out of Hull House were developed around ethnic affiliations, which was a way to retain community and customs in a time of rapid change and Americanization. The range of clubs at Hull-House was vast, and the numbers of people in and out of the Hull-House grounds reached nine thousand per week between 1906 and 1916. The clubs and associations were organized and operated by their members, some, like the “Greek Olympic Athletic Club,” were made up of Greek immigrants interested in athletics; others like the Hull-House Electrical Club, was made up of men who worked in electrical occupations. There were Greek and Russian social clubs, a 19th Ward Socialist Club, and the Jane Club, which was a co-operative boarding club for young women that operated its own house with thirty bedrooms. There were also general Men and Women’s Clubs, Boys and Girls’ Clubs, and educational programs in art, practical employment skills, and English language classes.

I find it unlikely that many of these clubs or programs were multi-racial in the first decades of Hull-House’s existence. Among the photographs of Hull-House activities located in archives at the University of Illinois at Chicago, photos from before 1920 depict what appear to be white groups.

This photograph, dated only “ca. 1920s” by Wallace Kirkland, shows a group of neighborhood children preparing to leave for the Bowen Country Club. (Hull-House Photograph Collection,University of Illinois at Chicago)

There is some evidence of Black participation in clubs and groups at Hull-House before the 1930s.  In 1913, the Chicago Defender wrote an obituary of George Williams, “the only Negro boy connected with Hull House as a member. He was a member of the band and took part in all the active branches of the settlement. Miss Jane Addams praised him to the highest. The day of his funeral the full band was out and his casket was borne by three Italians and one Jewish boy.” (Chicago Defender, September 20, 1913.)

An African-American women’s club was formed at Hull-House in 1925, first called “The Colored Mothers’ Club,” and later the “Community Club.” They met on Monday evenings and held monthly interracial meetings which the Chicago Defender characterized as “not only harmonious and satisfactory, but very helpful.”

This photo from around 1927 depicts the Hull House Community Club, composed of African-American women. (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).

The Defender continued:

In and around Hull House a large number of the foreign population moved into other neighborhoods, and their places have been taken up by our group. The residents of the famous social settlement are still living up to their ideals of helping the people in the neighborhood to adjust themselves, and our boys and girls are urged to join all of the classes, and with their elders are cordially invited to take part in all the activities of the place. (Chicago Defender, December 11, 1926, p. 5.)

But, does this one newspaper article tell the whole story? By 1937, the Defender characterized the Community Club as the medium through which Hull-House worked among the African-American community. The club was affiliated with the National Federation of Colored Women and its focus was on bettering conditions for African-Americans in their community. (Chicago Defender, September 25, 1937, p. 19.) Did Hull-House push African-American activity off to the side into one or two clubs? Did African-Americans feel welcome in the late 1930s when they walked into the settlement?

Dewey Jones, the Assistant Director of Hull-House in 1938 reported during a 1939 speech that one long-time member of the Community Club had complained that its members were not invited to take part in general community events. In 1941 a caption on a photograph depicting Black women at the Jane Addams Memorial Lilac Ball on May 24, 1941 noted that “Director Charlotte Carr insisted that African Americans be invited to the Ball.” The fact that Carr’s action was noted, makes it appear that it was not the norm.

The Jane Addams Memorial Lilac Ball was held May 24, 1941 at the Stevens Hotel in Chicago. (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).

Florence  Scala (1918-2007), an Italian-American resident of the West Side  and a volunteer at Hull-House from 1934 to 1954, recalled that though the Near West Side had a great mix of ethnic groups, “there were no blacks, blacks were not active in the Hull-House programs when I was going there.” (Carolyn Eastwood, Near West Side Stories: Struggles for Community in Chicago’s Maxwell Street Neighborhood (2002), p. 139.)

By the 1930s and especially by the early 1940s, photographs of Hull-House activities show the changing composition of the neighborhood.  There were Mexican fiestas, and pottery classes, and photographs of integrated children’s activities at the Joseph T. Bowen Country Club.

A Mexican fiesta was held at  Hull-House on June 13, 1941 for the purpose of bettering relationships between Mexicans and American in s the Chicago area. (Chicago Tribune, June 8,. 1941, p. 41. Hull-House Association Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).
Boys at the Bowen Country Club camp run by Hull-House, ca. 1946. (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).
Photos like these, with no clear date, save the “1920s-1930s” offer evidence of Black families participating in Hull-House programming, but not enough detail.  (Hull-House Photograph Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).

So we are left with conflicting recollections and reporting. Did Florence Skala have a very different experience at Hull-House than the children who attended the Bowen camp in the 1940s? Were the adult activities more racially divided, broken into clubs that kept to their own kind? Without additional documentation, it is hard to make a determination that includes all the voices we have.

We can close with a look at what African-American reporters said at the death of Jane Addams in 1935.  In an obituary written of Addams in 1935, Thyra Edwards of the Pittsburgh Courier focused on Addams and Hull-House with regard to race.

Jane Addams had no ‘attitude’ toward the Negro. To her he was just one of the citizenship, one part of the whole. She recognized that the distinction of color exposed him more easily to attack and discrimination at the same time, adding a moral responsibility upon Americans to work against extraordinary exploitation because of color.

When Negroes moved into Hull House, there was no ‘consultant’ as to whether they should be accepted and in what proportions. Quite simply, new neighbors had come to Hull House and they found their way into whatever classes or groups they chose. (Pittsburgh Courier, June 1, 1935, p. 9.)

Another tribute to Addams was published in the Chicago Defender, where Eugene Kinckle Jones remarked:

Jane Addams made no special effort to lead the Negro to the Promised Land but by no act or thought did she eliminate this race from the classes or groups most in need.’ At Hull House, they had no set place but they were eliminated from no place. In her condemnation of crime, she condemned lynching. In her belief in the extension of suffrage to all, she included the Negro in her ‘all.’ (Chicago Defender, June 29, 1935, p. 3.)

Thanks to Louise Knight for her research into the question which she graciously provided.