Hull-House | Jane Addams Papers Project

August 4, 2026August 4, 2026

Hull House Has a Visitor…And the Rest is History by Terrence J. McDonald.

A sepia-toned portrait of a man with short hair and a thick mustache, wearing a suit and bow tie, looking slightly to his left.

Terrence J. McDonald is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan. He is the author of Nearly Neighbors: Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination (2026), published by the University of Chicago Press.

In early December 1893 Chicago’s Hull House had an important visitor. The minutes of the residents’ meeting for December 10 noted that “Miss Addams announced that she had been honored with a visit from Alderman Powers, who proposed giving some thousands of pounds of turkey and beef to the poor of the ward at Christmas, and desired Hull House to make the distribution.” The proposal from Nineteenth Ward Democratic Alderman John “Johnny” Powers set off a strenuous debate among the sixteen settlers at the meeting, with the minutes recording a “protest,” two motions, and an amendment. Finally, “by general consent it was agreed that the Chief [Addams] should write to Mr. Powers, as she had herself suggested, to the effect that Hull House had so much provender sent in at Christmas time that it would be well for him to distribute his turkeys through other agencies.”

So began what would become one of the most famous, complicated, and significant relationships between a “boss” and a “reformer” in American history. From then until the spring of 1898, Addams and her Hull House colleagues would steadfastly oppose Powers, first simply by attempting to clean up the ward without his permission, then by coordinating two attempts to defeat him for reelection to his aldermanic seat in 1896 and 1898. More important in the long run, Addams’s own reflections on this relationship would become among the most famous of her early writings and also a major source for thinking about the conflict between bosses and reformers and the possibilities for a kind of “social ethics” in the American city in twentieth-century America, in her own time and thereafter.

Book cover for Nearly Neighbors by Terrence J. McDonald, featuring black-and-white portraits of a mustached man in a suit and a woman in a high-collared dress seated in a decorative chair.

But my new book, Nearly Neighbors: Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination is the first – ever – to attempt to write a contextualized history of this encounter, embedding it in the social and political culture and structures of Chicago and the Nineteenth Ward in the 1890s and using that context to understand both how Powers and Addams operated politically and how her – definitely important – writings about this experience portrayed it.

By 1896 Addams began lecturing on the way that ward bosses prospered politically, and by 1897 she had written a talk that was often entitled “Ethical Survivals in City Immorality.” A much revised and lengthened version of this lecture was published in the International Journal of Ethics in 1898 under the title “Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption,” and then a shortened form appeared in The Outlook, where it received the more popular title “Why the Ward Boss Rules.” A version of the long version of this essay became the stirring last chapter of her 1902 book, Democracy and Social Ethics, and formed the core of her remarks at the 1904 World’s Fair, which were published as “Problems in Municipal Administration” in the American Journal of Sociology in 1905.

Addams set out in these writings humanely to reject the reigning conception among some reformers that municipal corruption stemmed from “ignorant foreigners” driven to the polls by devious politicians. She wrote that the “simple people” of the ward were cultureless, bound together only by their “basic human nature.” But importantly they were also bundles of genuine economic need. Her argument was that it was perfectly rational for “needy” immigrants to vote for corrupt politicians, and furthermore, that satisfaction of those immigrant economic needs that were legitimate by an expanded local state was the pathway to “social democracy.”

In recognizing these needs, she argued – for a job, bail money, legal “pull,” rent money, presents at weddings, help with funeral expenses, etc. — the ward bosses, corrupt as they were, at least noticed them. Reformers, meanwhile, spent their time complaining about this state of affairs rather than humanely recognizing the needs of the immigrants. Addams’s ringing conclusion was this: “If we discover that men of low ideals and corrupt practice are forming popular political standards simply because such men stand by and for and with the people, then nothing remains but to obtain a like sense of identification before we can hope to modify ethical standards.”

A woman in a Victorian-era dress with puffed sleeves sits on an ornate chair with carved griffins, looking slightly to the side. The photo is black and white, with a formal, historical atmosphere. — Jane Addams, ca. 1898

Addams’s views were powerful because of her position: not only was she living among the immigrant poor since 1889, but, unlike many others in the settlement movement she had bravely challenged the political “boss” of the ward. But to make this argument Addams completely mis-characterized the ward population. Her starting assumption that immigrants were “cultureless” was her rationale for the work of the settlers which was, after all, to bring the “correct” culture to the immigrants. But this led her to ignore the dense markers of ethnic culture in the ward and, in particular, to leave out the fact that Hull House was surrounded by five ethnic Catholic parishes and their schools, including the largest English-speaking Catholic church in Chicago, Holy Family – home of the Irish – whose steeples were clearly visible from Hull House. These churches and schools had been in operation for decades before Hull House opened but the word “Catholic” would only casually appear in any version of her writings, and the word “Irish” would play no significant causal role.

Moreover, her account ignored the event that galvanized an ethnic Catholic political identity, a ferocious statewide 1892 battle over a new compulsory education law that gave public school boards the power to qualify all parochial schools – Catholic, Protestant, or other — for meeting the law. Although Hull House resident Florence Kelley was more vociferous in her support for the law Addams, too, sided with the reformers against her ethnic neighbors. And although neither of them was a nativist, the campaign on behalf of retaining the law was riddled with nativist arguments.

This battle has been mis-characterized by those around Hull House including pioneering scholars Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge — as a fight over teaching in foreign languages. But this meant nothing to the Irish, all of whose clergy and schools used perfect English. The issue for all sponsors of parochial schools was control of the curriculum and, yes, the ethnic recognition that the Irish and Germans, in particular, demanded but that Addams, Kelley and the reform coalition refused to deliver. The schools were a remarkable testimony to the belief of hard-pressed immigrants, many of whom were illiterate, in the power of education for their children. But this reality seemed lost on the upper-class reformers in favor of the law including those at Hull House. And this failure of recognition eliminated the possibility of an alliance among both reformers and immigrants on behalf of education.

Condemned by Catholic and Protestant clergy alike, the law was quickly repealed after the election of Democratic governor John Peter Altgeld and Democratic majorities in both houses of the Illinois legislature. Because municipal elections in Chicago occurred in the spring and state elections in the fall, this battle did not involve Powers directly at first. Powers had immigrated to Chicago in the 1870s and thanks to the pioneering work of an uncle and Powers’s future wife had become the owner of both a bar and a grocery store in the ward. He was a practicing Catholic, sent his children to the Catholic schools, and belonged to the relevant Irish associations. But in a ward where every elected official was the same there was little need to stress his background for most of the years after his first election in 1888. For most of that time, too, he simply ignored Hull House in his campaigns.

But the political persistence of Addams led Powers to shift to a completely identity-based campaign in 1898. Its symbolic and real climax was a parade on the Saturday night before the election that local reports said involved 3,000 marchers and thousands of spectators and formed up about a block away from Hull House. The parade itself was based on the periodic parades for first communions and holy days at Holy Family and the Holy Family youth temperance band (funded by Powers) – the St. Matthew’s Cadets — led it off. Of special interest were the Ladies Auxiliary of the Nineteenth ward Democratic Club and the Nineteenth ward Businessmen’s Club.

Neither the St. Matthew’s Cadets nor the Ladies Auxiliary or Businessmen’s Clubs had been seen in ward politics before. Powers had funded the first, and his campaign clearly organized the second and third. The Cadets were named after the famous Irish temperance advocate Father Theobold Matthew and proved that although Powers was Irish and a bar owner, he was comfortable with personal temperance efforts, including those of Holy Family parish itself. The Ladies Auxiliary and Businessmen’s Club carried heavier water, the former to show that the “local” women supported him – unlike those at Hull House – and that latter that the “calumnies” in the speeches and writings of the settlers and their candidates damaged the economic interest of the ward.

But the key thing about this parade and the campaign more generally was the ability of Powers to identify himself as a member of the ward based ethnic, religious, and political culture defending its interests against the “downtown” elites displayed in the Hull House campaign. Unable to respond carefully to this neighborhood appeal the reform forces disastrously invited as their keynote speaker against Powers an “uptown” city council member who was the son of a United States supreme court justice and graduate of Princeton who emphasized that Powers was the “Prince of Boodlers” on City Council. Powers took 72 percent of the votes in this election and would remain on the council until 1923.

Although the settlers promised to keep up the fight, Hull House withdrew from ward politics just before the municipal election of 1900. In explanation Addams claimed that it was because, given his “wealth and political methods he could easily defeat any honest man.” But this had little to do with his victory. He was certainly rich and he may very well have been corrupt but had won in 1898 because – partially out of desperation – he had found a way to endorse and celebrate the identity of the ward against the “downtown” interests and “hectoring” reformers – most of whom had publicly supported the controversial school law that Addams herself never condemned.

It was an article of faith among progressive era intellectuals and reformers – originating with the young John Dewey — that an “unidentified” political subject and thus emerging citizen existed. In her important 1902 essay “Friendship in Politics,” the New York settlement worker Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—clearly influenced by Addams — wrote that progress toward that goal was actually being made. “That is the hopeful thing about democracy,” she wrote, “it is slow but thorough. A common consciousness is arising. The man is becoming the citizen.” This emerging “common consciousness” was a consciousness of shared human needs, not of differing—and sometimes conflicting—cultures. And it was founded on and ratified by the all-important experience of the settlement workers on the urban front lines who defined their mission as bringing culture to the immigrants, not necessarily discovering the role of immigrant cultures in political mobilization.

But as historian Richad Oestreicher pointed out in a classic essay about class and politics in the American city it is the process of political mobilization that helps create political consciousness and not the other way around. And that initial mobilization leaves a mark. This process was repeated in Chicago through the next decades with the rise of the United Societies for Local Self-Government as the bane of reformers and the foundation for the election of the city’s first foreign born mayor, Anton Cermak.

Addams’s wise – if misdirected — words ring down through the centuries: “If we discover that men of low ideals and corrupt practice are forming popular political standards simply because such men stand by and for and with the people, then nothing remains but to obtain a like sense of identification before we can hope to modify ethical standards.” But identify with what? The immigrants around Hull House were bearers of culture and not just bundles of economic needs. Their enrollment in what has come to be called “identity” politics was a foundational historical reality rather than an obstacle to historical development based on some other criterion, such as class, mobility, assimilation, etc. And the failure of otherwise brave and self-less settlers to understand this has impeded the development of a positive theory of a multicultural society down through the twentieth century.

Selected Sources:

Jane Addams, “Residents’ Meeting of December 10, 1893,” in The Jane Addams Papers, 1860–1960, ed. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1984).

Jane Addams, “Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption,” International Journal of Ethics 8, no. 3 (April 1898): 273–91; “Why the Ward Boss Rules,” The Outlook 58, no. 14 (April 2, 1898): 879–82; “Political Reform,” in Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 221–77; “Problems in Municipal Administration,” American Journal of Sociology 10, no. 4 (January 1905): 425–44. Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910).

Abbott, Edith, and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge. Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools: A Study of the Social Aspects of the Compulsory Education and Child Labor Legislation of Illinois. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917.

Hamilton, Alice. Alice Hamilton to Agnes Hamilton, April 3, 1898. In Barbara Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Hamilton Letters, 120–22. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Dewey, John. The Ethics of Democracy. Ann Arbor, MI: Andrews, 1888.

Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury. “Friendship and Politics.” Political Science Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1902): 189-205.

Oestreicher, Richard. “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940.” Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1, 1988).

May 9, 2025July 21, 2026

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

A woman in a striped dress and headscarf speaks into a microphone while holding papers, addressing an audience in a formal setting. People are seated in the background, listening attentively.

By Rima Lunin Schultz

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 sits outdoors surrounded by a group of children, attentively listening to her. The scene appears historical, with everyone dressed in early 20th-century clothing. — 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.

Five people in tattered clothing make dramatic, animated facial expressions and gestures, with arms raised and eyes wide, conveying intense emotion against a plain background. The photo is black and white. — 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.

A group of people, mostly young adults, pose cheerfully on a large wooden playground structure in a park, smiling and waving. The structure is pyramid-shaped, and some people are sitting while others are standing or climbing. — 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.

Black and white portrait of a Julia Lathrop wiith dark hair styled up, wearing a high-necked, long-sleeve light-colored blouse with ruffles and lace details, looking slightly to the side with a neutral expression. — 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.

Sepia photo of an old-fashioned grocery store with shelves of cans and goods. A woman stands behind the counter, another woman holds a child in front. Various products and sacks are visible throughout the cozy shop. — 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.

May 1, 2025July 21, 2026

Florence Giovangelo Scala, Hull-House and Neighborhood Planning

Three women sit on the ground eating and drinking, while a fourth woman, standing, hands them food. They are indoors, beside a wall with a mural. The women appear to be engaged in conversation and sharing a meal.

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.

Black-and-white photo of a three-story corner building with worn walls and a striped awning over the entrance. People walk on the sidewalk, cars are parked, and a street sign reads Taylor and S. Miller St. — 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.

A young man in a suit and glasses sits next to an elderly woman in a hat and dress, holding a cane, under a large tree outdoors. Both are looking at the camera with neutral expressions. — 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]

Three people stand in front of a large planning board map labeled present land use, discussing and pointing to areas on the map as part of a planning meeting. The image appears to be from a newspaper. — 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.

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.

A black-and-white photo of a large urban construction site, with multiple modernist buildings in progress, cranes in the background, and a city skyline visible under a partly cloudy sky. — 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.

April 14, 2025July 23, 2026

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

A group of children holding hands in a circle, playing outdoors on a dirt playground near a building with arched windows and a covered area in the background. The children are wearing old-fashioned clothes.

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

Four children in period costumes stand or sit around a table with bowls, while an adult woman in an apron stands beside them holding a book, possibly directing or reading to them in a staged setting. — 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 black-and-white photo of a large group of women and children gathered indoors for a community event, labeled A Neighborhood Party. Some women appear to be reading or singing from papers. — 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.

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).

March 27, 2025September 29, 2025

Presenting at the Chicago Women’s History Conference

Three smiling women stand indoors next to a life-size black-and-white cutout of a historical woman; two women wear name badges and one wears a shirt with a printed image. Ornate architecture is visible in the background.

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.

April 17, 2024October 14, 2025

Hull House and Benny Goodman

Black and white portrait of Benny Goodman wearing glasses, a suit with a patterned tie, and a herringbone jacket. He is smiling slightly and looking to the side, with his hair neatly combed back.

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.

A black-and-white photo shows a marching band of young men in uniform, holding instruments, standing in formation on a city street, with buildings and onlookers in the background. — 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.

— James La Forge, Editorial Assistant

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;

December 7, 2023October 14, 2025

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.

July 27, 2022October 14, 2025

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

Black and white portrait of a woman with dark hair pulled back, wearing a light-colored top. Above her head is a large handwritten signature that reads Clara Landsberg.

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 17^th to 19^th, 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).

August 24, 2021September 29, 2025

Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks –An Audio Musical

A sepia-toned image of a woman looking down is overlaid with the title Saint Jane and the Wicked Wicks, a Ferris wheel, and text about a new musical play set in 1890s Chicago by Kristin Lems.

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.

August 11, 2021September 29, 2025

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

A black-and-white portrait of a woman wearing round glasses, a fur hat, and a fur-collared coat, looking directly at the camera with a neutral expression.

A Black woman wearing a thick fur coat and hat faces the camera. She has a serious expression and wears a monocle. The image is black and white, with a plain light background. — 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.

A bronze medal featuring a relief of a woman holding a laurel branch, attached to a white ribbon with red and blue stripes at the edges. — 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.

July 21, 2021September 29, 2025

Segregation At Hull-House: A Closer Look

A group of twelve boys of diverse backgrounds, some shirtless, sit and stand closely together in a room with wooden walls, smiling and posing for the camera.

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.

A large group of men and women, many wearing hats and formal attire, gathered outdoors between brick buildings at the Fourth Annual Conference of the NAACP in Chicago, 1912. A sign below lists notable participants. — 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.

A detailed, color-coded map of Chicago blocks from Polk to Twelfth and Halsted to Jefferson, showing the distribution of various nationalities in 1895 through colored rectangles representing individual buildings. — 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 vintage black-and-white photo shows a group of young children in old-fashioned clothing and hats standing outdoors, with an adult woman behind them and buildings visible in the background. — 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.

A large group of children and a few adults pose for a photo on a city sidewalk in front of a brick building, with some children sitting on the curb and others standing behind them. — 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.”

A group of Black women in dresses pose in front of a bus labeled “Willett Motor Coach Company” in a grassy outdoor setting, with vintage cars and trees visible in the background. — 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.

Four people sit in a row of chairs watching a dance, while two couples dance nearby. The setting appears to be a formal event with women in dresses and men in suits. Some seats in the background are empty. — 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).

A group of children in winter clothing stand in a hallway, some holding hands, accompanied by a few adults. The children appear to be waiting or lined up near a doorway. — 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.

February 17, 2021October 14, 2025

A Japanese Visitor at Hull-House

Black and white portrait of a man with short hair and a mustache, wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, facing forward against a plain background.

Every Sunday evening during the winter months, visitors jockeyed for seats in the Hull-House Auditorium. They came for the weekly Hull-House lecture at 8 p.m. They came to hear from diverse speakers, who shared knowledge and enthusiasm for a wide range of topics and used the stereopticon (an early projector) to illustrate their thoughts and ideas.

The Hull-House settlement’s winter lecture series was wildly popular, and every week many people were turned away after the auditorium filled all of its 750 seats. The lecture series was an important part of the settlement’s mission. The lectures were intended to educate, to inspire, to encourage appreciation for the arts, science, and culture, and to foster respect for new people and new ideas. The lectures were free, and working people from the Hull-House neighborhood, predominately men, made up a good share of the audience.

Black and white architectural drawing of the Auditorium and Coffee House at Hull House, Chicago, by Pond & Pond Architects. The building has arched windows and decorative rooflines. Two people walk on the sidewalk in front. — Hull-House Coffee House and Theatre Building, constructed in 1899. The Auditorium was located on the second floor.

On Sunday, Nov. 29, 1903, the speaker was Toyokichi Iyenaga and his topic was “Beautiful Japan.” Iyenaga was a lecturer in political science at the University of Chicago and was an expert on Japanese diplomacy.

Professor Iyenaga was born in Japan in 1862 and came to the United States to study at Oberlin College, where he won a prestigious oratorical contest and earned his degree in 1887. After he completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1890, he settled in Chicago, where he was a lecturer at the University of Chicago for nineteen years. Iyenaga distinguished himself as an orator and was a prolific, compelling, and sometimes controversial speaker. At a public lecture in Chicago in July 1903, Iyenaga raised eyebrows by arguing that American women could learn from the women of Japan, in matter of their attire, because Japanese women did not waste their time on fashion and did not, like their American counterparts, endure “the torture of high-heeled shoes or shock the sensibilities of right-minded people by wearing dead birds on her hats.”

Black-and-white newspaper photo of Toyokichi Iyenaga, Ph.D., with a mustache, wearing a suit and tie. The caption mentions his upcoming lecture on Japan of Today at the Twentieth Century Club. — News coverage of his visit

Iyenaga was a colorful speaker. He was also, for most people, a curiosity. In 1903, there was only a small number of Japanese people living in the United States, and most of them were settled in the Pacific Northwest. American immigration policy—like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred the immigration of Chinese laborers and later the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement between Japan and the U.S. to restrict Japanese immigration—reflected prevailing racist sentiments in America against Asian peoples. As well, racist imagery of “Yellow Peril” exacerbated irrational fears that people from the East represented an existential danger to people in the West. Thus, the Japanese community in Chicago was small and remained small, growing only to about 300 in the city by the 1920s.

One of the quintessential characteristics of Jane Addams’s philosophy as a human being and as a reformer was the importance of intercultural exchange, of face-to-face interaction between people of widely diverse backgrounds, of different races and cultures, religious affiliation, and economic or social class. Critical to that philosophy in the organization and management of Hull-House was providing a forum for all people and all viewpoints. Over the years, Hull-House hosted anarchists, socialists, feminists, labor organizers, and many other people with sometimes controversial ideas and radical rhetoric. Speakers like the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin and the African-American leaders W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, who were not welcome in many venues in the segregated United States, were welcome at Hull-House.

Hull-House provided child care, pure milk, economic resources, and educational opportunities. It was a laboratory for social, political, and economic reform. It launched the careers of dozens of progressive reformers. It sheltered people and fed them. It helped poor people navigate charitable, educational, and municipal bureaucracies. It offered spaces for immigrants to celebrate their cultural traditions and to learn ways to embrace their new Americanness, too. But Hull-House also offered a venue for ideas to freely flow, and for diverse voices to speak, to be heard, and to be respected. It was not so much brave as it was a simple imperative, a nonnegotiable truth in the world view of Jane Addams.

And so, there was Dr. Iyenaga at Hull-House on a winter night in 1903. Not a curiosity or a “Jap,” as a majority of Americans would have described him. Rather, an educated man and a talented orator with an interesting perspective to offer an audience of a mostly poor, immigrant quarter of Chicago.

The more I study Jane Addams and the activities of Hull-House, the more I appreciate the wide and beautiful network of people she cultivated and the open arms of the settlement she led. In the narrative of Hull-House, there was a never ending flow of people with breathtaking stories to tell us about the American past. Toyokichi Iyenaga is one of those stories. He is another person on my growing list of people who came into the Hull-House orbit who are worthy of at least a small spotlight of his own.

After that first Sunday lecture, Professor Iyenaga returned to Hull-House for additional lectures. He attended a teacher’s workshop in Iowa with Jane Addams in 1906, and he worked with her in the peace movement. In 1917, he and Addams attended a peace conference in New York, where he urged the United States to allow Japanese admission to citizenship and argued that “hundreds” of Japanese men in America wanted to enlist to fight Germany but were prevented from doing so. In 1921, he helped fund the attendance of Matsuyo Takaziwaa, a young Japanese woman and Wellesley College student, at the Third International Congress of Women in Vienna, at which Jane Addams presided as president.

Sometime in the 1910s, Toyokichi Iyenaga traded the University of Chicago for Columbia University and moved his wife Yui and son Katsunosuke “Kenneth” to New York. He continued his work as a professor with growing expertise in U.S.-Japanese relations and remained a popular public lecturer. He also published several books, his most prominent Japan and the California Problem, published in 1921. From the limited historical record of his life, Iyenaga’s immigrant story was a successful one. He prospered, won respect as a scholar, and raised his son, who became a small businessman. In 1922, the elder Iyenagas retired to Oneida County, New York, where they were prominent citizens and active in charitable causes. In 1936, Professor Iyenaga was ice fishing on Oneida Lake, fell through the ice, and drowned. He was seventy-four years old, and he left behind a wife, son, daughter-in-law, two young grandsons, and an impressive list of publications.

But that was not the end of his immigrant story. And, sadly, the end of that story was an ugly one, reflecting the depth of racism in the United States, and the sad truth that in some ways not much had changed since Toyokichi Iyenaga was a young professor in Chicago.

On Dec. 23, 1942, a drunk white man announced to his friends in a bar in Sylvan Beach, NY, that he could “get a couple of Japs. I’m not just talking either.” With his .32 caliber automatic revolver, he walked a mile to the home of Kenneth Iyenaga, the late Professor Iyenaga’s 47-year-old son. The Iyenaga family, five of just 460 Japanese-Americans who lived in upstate New York in 1942, lived in a 1920s house, built from a Sears Roebuck construction kit. There was a photograph of Gen. Douglas McArthur in a front window and a portrait of George Washington hanging in the parlor. The Iyenagas were patriotic Americans. Kenneth purchased war bonds and donated an old car in a local drive for scrap metal. His wife Kei, a Japanese immigrant who graduated from Barnard College, volunteered for the American Red Cross.

The shooter who had come to murder the Iyenagas was Joe O’Toole, a 64-year-old former bartender. He came in the kitchen door with his gun and started shooting. He first hit Kei in the neck, he shot the 77-year-old widow of Professor Iyenaga in the thigh, abdomen, and shoulder, and then he shot Kenneth once in the chest. Fortunately, the Iyenaga’s elder son Yone escaped when the shooting started, and their younger son Kenneth Jr. was not at home at the time.

Kei and Yui survived their injuries, but Kenneth died that day on the kitchen floor. O’Toole confessed his crime. He was proud. “I shot the damn Japs,” he told police.

O’Toole was indicted for murder and assault, but the court excused him of responsibility. Instead, he was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He escaped justice, or perhaps he was dealt the only kind of justice a white criminal justice system in America could see. In 1943. When the country was at war with people who looked like O’Toole’s victims. O’Toole was white, so he was lucky. The Iyenaga family was brown, and not so lucky. A mother lost her only son that day, a wife became a widow, and two boys no longer had a father.

The Iyenaga family’s immigration story represented the best and worst of what America offered and denied immigrants. Jane Addams appreciated the possibilities and understood the difficulties Toyokichi Iyenaga faced in Chicago in 1903 at the time he delivered a lecture about the beauty of his native country at Hull-House. She would have been horrified by the violence his family faced, seven years after she was buried.

During World War I, Jane Addams never wavered in her commitment to peace, paying a high price in reputation and support for Hull-House. I have often wondered if she would have set aside the peace dove when the United States stood up against Hitler in World War II. But I don’t have to wonder about one thing. Based on how she maintained her respect for German people during World War I, I feel confident she would have maintained her respect for Japanese people during World War II. She understood that you could abhor a country’s militaristic behavior and not abhor that country’s people.

I also feel confident that Jane Addams would have been a vocal opponent of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Not only because she knew Toyokichi Iyenaga, but because she understood that democracy or peace or anything that is worth holding requires an acceptance that all people are entitled to their humanity.

by Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Michael D. Albert, “Japanese,” in Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton, eds., The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 253-55; Masako Osako, “Japanese Americans: Melting into the All-American Melting Pot,” in Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones, Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 409-37; Greg Robinson, The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016), 276-77; “Japanese,” Encyclopedia of Chicago; Report of the Third International Congress of Women (Geneva: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1921), 165; 1920 U.S. Federal Census; 1940 U.S. Federal Census; Toyokichi Iyenaga Gravestone, Verona Beach Cemetery, Verona Beach, NY; Cap and Gown (University of Chicago Year Book), (1904), 25; “A Jap Carries off a Prize,” Gibson City (IL) Courier, Jan. 28, 1887, p. 2; “Finds Fault with American Women,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), July 25, 1903, p. 3; “The Jap, Toyokichi Iyenaga,” Bureau County Tribune (Princeton, IL), Aug. 11, 1905, p. 6 (image 1 of Iyenaga); “Iyenaga Tells of Women in Japan,” The Dispatch (Moline, IL), Feb. 22, 1906, p. 5; “Good Program Is Prepared,” The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA), Oct. 5, 1906, p. 5; “Toyokichi Iyenaga, Ph.D.,” The Buffalo Sunday Morning News, Nov. 30, 1913, p. 37 (image 2 of Iyenaga); “Charges Hibben Is in Pay of Greece,” The Boston Globe, June 1, 1917, p. 10; “Toyokichi Iyenaga, Former Lecturer at U. of C., Drowns,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 30, 1936, p. 1; “Ex-Bartender Held in Killing of Jap at Rome,” Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY), Dec. 24, 1942, p. 28; “Slaying of Jap Laid to Insanity of Man Tested Here,” Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY), Mar. 17, 1943, p. 17; “Tragedy That Struck the Iyenaga Family,” Syracuse (NY) Herald American, Aug. 11, 1985; Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 429-31; Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:606 (image of auditorium); Hull-House Bulletin, 6 (Mid-Winter 1903-04), 1, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm (JAPM), 53:1170; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Jane Addams to W. E. B. Du Bois, January 26, 1907; Mabel Hyde Kittredge to Jane Addams, May 18, 1921, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

February 8, 2021September 29, 2025

Hull-House of Possibilities

Four young girls in dresses perform indoors; one plays piano, one plays violin, and two stand in the center singing. They all have short bobbed haircuts and stand on a wooden floor with framed pictures on the wall behind them. — Children Practicing at the Hull-House Music School. (Photo courtesy: Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois Chicago).

On February 21, 1901, little Blanche Ebert performed big musical compositions by Ludwig van Beethoven and Stephen Heller on the piano at a concert at Hull-House. She was a student of the Hull-House Music School and one of four gifted pupils who performed that day. Blanche was nine years old, and her passion for music just blossoming, but her education at Hull-House, a settlement dedicated to expanding the definition of the possible for young people, must have given her early confidence, both as a pianist and as a girl.

Hull-House Music School offered “serious musical training to talented children,” admitting them based upon aptitude tests; and Blanche was no doubt gifted from the start. But as she hailed from a poor immigrant family in the 18^th Ward, just north of Hull-House, Blanche was also at least a little bit lucky, too. Most poor children did not have access to the musical instruments, private lessons, and concerts, like those offered at the Hull-House Music School.

Blanche Ebert Seaver, 1916. (Photo courtesy David Stoddard Atwood Collection, California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, CA).

In a brochure circulated to raise funds for the Hull-House Music School in the late 1890s, Jane Addams said: “We realize afresh that it is the business of youth to reaffirm the beauty and joy in the world.” In order to succeed in that business, girls and boys deserved cultural nourishment, Addams believed. Much of the focus of the activities at Hull-House revolved around children, each one an effort to expose young people to a world beyond the tenements and dirty streets of urban Chicago, to organize activities to bring art and music and beauty to people in the settlement’s neighborhood. At Hull-House, children were deemed worthy of attention and nurturing in the arts, and activities like private piano lessons , gave them remarkable opportunities to redefine their futures.

Blanche Ella Theodora Ebert was born on Sep. 15, 1891, in Chicago, the tenth child of Norwegian immigrant parents. Her father supported his large family as a painter, and in 1901 Blanche was one of seven children still living at home. We cannot know how Blanche felt as she took the stage to perform the opening piece of music by Beethoven for the Hull-House concert in 1901, but we can imagine something of what the opportunity to play a piano and perform for an audience meant to an underprivileged kid on a cold Chicago day in the early twentieth century. And we do know that Blanche Ebert took full advantage of the opportunity, charting for herself an unlikely and brave career as a pianist and composer.

Until about 1906, Blanche was a piano student and assistant music teacher at Hull-House. Her natural talent and her education at Hull-House afforded her entry into the Chicago Musical College from which she graduated in 1911. In 1912, she felt bold and moved west to Los Angeles, where she became a music teacher at the Egan School of Music and Drama. She also performed as a pianist in a variety of venues in southern California and became a “noted” accompanist. By late 1914, she was teaching at Blanchard Music School in Los Angeles and playing piano for silent films shown at the Majestic Theatre.

One day while riding the streetcar downtown, Blanche met Frank R. Seaver, an attorney eight years her senior. The couple married in Chicago on Sep. 16, 1916. They lived in California for a while before moving to New York, where Frank was stationed during WWI. In New York during that time, Blanche became a successful musical arranger and composer, writing and selling dozens of songs, many to popular artists of the day like the Irish singer John McCormack. Her most famous songs were “Calling Me Back to You,” composed during the war, and “Just for Today.”

Cover page for Battle Hymn of the Republic, arranged by Blanche Ebert Seaver, dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, published by Gamble Hinged Music Co., Chicago. Dated February 11, 1919.

Vintage sheet music cover titled Calling Me Back to You shows a silhouetted woman sitting under a tree, looking at a crescent moon and clouds in a blue night sky. Text credits Blanche Ebert Seaver for words and music.

In the 1920s, the Seavers lived in Mexico City, and it was there where Blanche discovered a second passion, philanthropy. She established a society to help homeless Mexican children, and that was the start of seventy-years of generous living. The Seavers moved back to the United States in 1928, settling permanently in Los Angeles. Frank Seaver made a fortune in the oil business, and Blanche became a well-known philanthropist.

Inspired and grateful for the education she received in Chicago, Blanche focused her giving on educational institutions. She and her husband donated money to the Harvard Boys School in L.A., the University of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University, Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, Rockford College in Illinois, and Pepperdine University. After Frank’s death in 1964, Blanche continued her giving, helping Pepperdine establish its Malibu campus and dedicating the Frank R. Seaver College there in 1975.

Throughout her life, Blanche, who never had children, continued to share her love of music and was an active patron of the arts and a supporter of children’s charities. She supported the Los Angeles Music Center, the Los Angeles Symphony, the Los Angeles Pops Orchestra, and the famous Hollywood Bowl. She also founded the Los Angeles Orphanage Guild and served as a member of the Board of Directors of Los Angeles Children’s Hospital. In 1963, the Los Angeles Times named her “Woman of the Year;” and MacMurray College in Illinois and Pepperdine University awarded her honorary doctorate degrees in 1973 and 1980, respectively.

Blanche Ebert Seaver died on April 14, 1994, ninety-three years after playing Beethoven at Hull-House. Her story is a second-generation American story. Her hard-working immigrant parents could only have dreamed of such a robust life for their children. But Seaver’s story is also a story of what Hull-House could offer little girls and little boys with talents and courage and dreams. Jane Addams could not write such a story as Blanche’s for every child who took advantage of the programs at Hull-House. But every single day, through its programs and activities, the settlement exposed young people to the arts and made a difference in the lives of the children in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. Blanche’s story is one shining musical example of how Hull-House was a house of possibilities.

Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Los Angeles City Directory (1915), 757; Blanche Ebert and Frank R. Seaver Papers, Finding Aid, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA; 1900 U.S. Federal Census; 1910 U.S. Federal Census; Blanche Ebert Baptismal Record, U.S. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Church Records, 1781-1969; Ebert and Seaver Marriage Record, Cook County, Illinois, U.S., Marriage Index, 1871-1920; “Chicago at a Glance,” Chicago Tribune, June 17, 1900, p. 50; “Reception to Pianist,” Los Angeles Express, Oct. 19, 1912; “Egan Recital Will Be Given Tomorrow,” Los Angeles Express, Jan. 8, 1913, p. 7; “The Festival Choir,” Los Angeles Express, Mar. 21, 1913, p. 10; “Whittier Choral Society,” The Whittier (CA) News, Mar. 24, 1914, p. 3; “Coronation of Queen Thelma Chamber Music Featured,” The Daily Telegram (Long Beach, CA), June 6, 1914, p. 5; “Important Musical,” Hollywood (CA) Citizen, July 3, 1914, p. 5; “Lost and Found,” Los Angeles Express, Nov. 27, 1914, p. 17; “Brahms Quintet Will Give Concert,” Los Angeles Express, Feb. 25, 1915, p. 6; “Majestic,” The Los Angeles Times, Mar. 31, 1916, p. 16; “Seaver-Ebert Nuptials, Chicago Event,” The Bulletin (Pomona, CA), Sep. 17, 1916, p. 9; “Mac to Confer Five Honorary Degrees at Commencement,” The Jacksonville (IL) Journal Courier, May 20, 1973, p. 36; “Blanche E. Seaver, Major Donor to Colleges, Dies,” The Los Angeles Times, Apr. 13, 1994, p. 206; “Seaver, Blanche Ebert,” The Los Angeles Times, Apr. 17, 1994, p. 164; Hull-House Music School,” pamphlet, c. 1935, Jane Addams Papers, Microfilm Edition (JAPM), 36:78-81; Hull-House Bulletin, 4 (January 1-May 1, 1901), 4-5, JAPM, 53:1123-24; Hull-House Bulletin, 5 (Semi-Annual, 1902, no. 1), 5, JAPM, 53:1141; Hull-House Bulletin, 6 (Autumn, 1904, no. 2), 4, JAPM, 53:1193; Hull-House Bulletin, 7 (1906-1906, no. 1), 6, 53:1219; Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:421, 473n3; Jane Addams’ Own Story of Her Work: How the Work at Hull-House Has Grown (Third of Three Installments), May 1906; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Hull-House 1889-1909, 1909, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

November 4, 2020September 29, 2025

Hull-House in the Family and in the Stars

A dense field of bright stars and glowing clouds of gas in deep space, with blue and white hues, creating a vibrant and sparkling cosmic scene.

A black-and-white portrait of a woman with dark hair, wearing a light-colored blouse with a rounded collar and a dark choker necklace with a round pendant. She faces the camera with a neutral expression. — Henrietta Swope, the daughter of Gerard and Mary Hill Swope.

When I wrote last time on the “The Other Worldly Orbit of Jane Addams,” I knew I was going to follow it up by writing the story of a particular Hull-House resident, the daughter of Hull-House residents, who became an astronomer and very early in her career discovered 385 stars. This story of a woman named Henrietta Swope began at Hull-House, where her settlement worker parents met. It passed back through Hull-House with her own year of residency at the settlement after her graduation from Barnard College in 1925. And it is as illustrative of the extraordinary list of human beings who had a connection to Jane Addams and to Hull-House as the variable stars Swope studied are of the beauty of the universe.

Henrietta Swope began dreaming about the stars when she was ten years old, and I cannot help but think that at least a little part of the reason she was able to reach those stars was because she had Hull-House in her family.

But more about the stars later. Let’s start Henrietta’s story at the very beginning.

On Tuesday, August 20, 1901, at noon, in a clearing in the woods on Mackinac Island in northern Michigan, Jane Addams delivered a wedding speech. It was an unusual venue for the settlement leader to give a speech. But it was an unusual wedding. It was the union of Hull-House residents Mary Hill and Gerard Swope, two young members of the extended Hull-House family. A large contingent of the small wedding party were Hull-House residents, including the bride and groom’s best friends George Hooker and Maud Gernon.

Addressing the couple and the wedding party near picturesque Sugar Loaf Rock, Addams said, in part:

“Knowing as we do something of the character of these two people, somewhat of the temper of their attachment and the form of the expression we may confidently predict that and all life’s journey through to the end is will be illuminated by [that] Love which carries a burden which is no burden, the Love which attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility for it believes all things are possible to itself.”

It’s a coincidence and not at all prophetic, but I love that Addams used the word “illuminated” and wow, indeed, “all things are possible.”

Mary Hill and Gerard Swope were two extraordinary young people who found their way to Hull-House and who would be forever shaped by the experience. Mary was the thirty-year-old the daughter of a former Harvard president and an 1896 graduate of Bryn Mawr College. She moved to Chicago to study at the University of Chicago under renown educator John Dewey. In 1898, she became a resident at Hull-House, where she taught textile classes and basket weaving, directed the Hull-House Shakespeare Club, and for a time managed the Hull-House Labor Museum. The twenty-eight-year-old Gerard Swope, a native of St. Louis, arrived in Chicago with a degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked at the Western Electric Company in Chicago, and he taught English, electronics, and algebra classes at Hull-House and lived at the settlement for a short time in 1897. Mary and Gerard met at the settlement and fell in love.

Black and white portrait of a middle-aged man in a suit and tie, with short, neatly-combed hair, looking directly at the camera with a neutral expression. — Gerard Swope George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

Gerard moved to St. Louis in 1899 to become a branch manager there for Western Electric, and Mary remained at Hull-House. The couple maintained a long-distance relationship until their wedding, after which Mary joined her new husband in St. Louis, where she did social welfare work and the couple started their family. Their first child Henrietta was born in St. Louis on October 26, 1902. Three sons—Isaac, David, and Gerard Jr.—followed, and a fourth son John was born in New Jersey where Gerard Sr. moved the family as his career path led him to the East Coast. In 1919, Gerard became president of General Electric’s new subsidiary International G.E., and the family moved to Manhattan. Gerard was involved with various reform organizations and he worked for quality working conditions which set him apart in the 1920s from many of his contemporary leaders of large corporations. Mary became a member of the board of directors of the Henry Street Settlement, operated by Lillian Wald, the good friend of Jane Addams, and she volunteered at Greenwich House and served as vice-chair of the New York branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Over the years, Mary and Gerard Swope kept in touch with Jane Addams, visited Hull-House, and made donations to the settlement. Gerard became a millionaire and in 1922 became the president of General Electric. The Swopes sent their bright daughter Henrietta off to Barnard College, where she earned her degree in mathematics; and then they sent her off to Chicago. Or perhaps Henrietta herself felt the pull of social work and felt the family connection to Hull-House. Although little is known about Henrietta’s time in that city, she lived at the settlement and worked in a program for the elderly while studying in the School of Social Service Administration (formerly the School of Civics and Philanthropy) at the University of Chicago with two significant members of Jane Addams’s orbit, Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott.

But Henrietta Swope was still dreaming of the stars.

So she left Chicago to take a job at Harvard to work for the astronomy professor Dr. Harlow Shapley at the Harvard Observatory. While she looked for variable stars and became Shapley’s first assistant, she earned a Master’s degree in astronomy from Radcliffe College in 1928. The following year, she became famous when she identified 385 new stars, which helped scientists identify the “hub” of the Milky Way. At the time, Swope was touted as “one of the youngest women ever to have made a comparable mark in scientific research.” During her long, successful career as an astronomer, she studied Cepheid variable stars in dwarf galaxies and M 31, the Andromeda Galaxy. However, her most significant contribution was developing a new method for measuring the universe, using the brightness of stars, which became known as the “celestial yardstick.” I don’t understand any of this, but it sounds amazing. Henrietta Swope was an accomplished and well-respected scientist.

In 1936, Henrietta Swope was a member of the joint-expedition of the Harvard Observatory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study the solar eclipse in Soviet Central Asia. During World War II, she worked in the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory and then served as a mathematician in the Hydrographic Office of the United States Department of the Navy. Swope returned to Barnard College in 1947 to teach astronomy until 1952, when she moved to California to work at the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories. After her retirement in 1968, she continued to work at the observatories. Swope was a member of the American Astronomical Society; she won the American Astronomical Society Annie Jump Cannon Prize in 1968 for her research on photometry and variable stars; and she received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Basel in Switzerland.

Henrietta Swope dreamed of the stars, she reached the stars, and then she made certain many generations to come could see the stars. In 1969, when she was in active retirement, Swope donated $650,000 worth of securities to the Carnegie Institution of Washington for the development of the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and the installation of a 40-inch telescope in the mountains. The Swope Telescope began operation in 1971. Henrietta Swope died in 1980, but the observatory she helped established is still helping people look at the stars.

Now, how’s that for a life story from the otherworldly orbit of Jane Addams?

By Stacy Lynn,
Associate Editor

Sources: “Swope, Gerard,” American National Biography; Mary Hill Swope Papers, Finding Aid, Special Collections, University of Illinois Chicago; Papers of Henrietta Hill Swope, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; Oral History of Henrietta Swope, August 1977, Transcript, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD; Carnegie Institution of Washington, Year Book 67, 1967-1868, 73-74; “Hull House Teacher is Wed,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 21, 1901, p. 3; “Romantic Wedding,” The Daily Herald (Port Huron, MI), Aug. 21, 1901, p. 5; “Wealthy Girl Aids in Finding Universe’s Hub,” The Capital Times (Madison, WI), June 11, 1929, p. 6 (image 1); “Girl Aids in Discovering Hub of Universe,” The Rock Island (IL) Argus, June 13, 1929, p. 12; “Henrietta Swope Wins Distinction,” The North Addams (MA) Transcript, June 24, 1929, p. 8; “Girl in Her Twenties Gets Credit in Major Scientific Discovery,” The Dispatch (Moline, IL), July 26, 1929, p. 31; “Girl Eclipses Stay-at-Homes,” Journal Gazette (Mattoon, IL), July 6, 1936, p. 6 (image 2); “Henrietta H. Swope, Is Dead; Helped to Measure Variable Stars,” The New York Times, Nov. 28, 1980, p. 28; “Studies Gauged Depths of Space,” The Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 1980, p. 23; Hull-House Bulletin, 3 (Oct. 1898), 7, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm Edition (JAPM), 53:1051; Hull-House Bulletin, 3 (Nov. 1898), 4, JAPM, 53:1058; Hull-House Bulletin, 4 (Autumn 1900), 3, 4, JAPM, 53:1106-1107; Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 3:618n5; Jane Addams to Florence Kelley, August 1, 1901; Address at the wedding of Gerard Swope and Mary Dayton Hill, August 21, 1901; Jane Addams to Esther Linn Hulbert, July 16, 1901; Gerard Swope to Jane Addams, January 7, 1905; Mary Hill Swope to Jane Addams, December, 1910; Gerard Swope to Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, January 19, 1923, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

September 15, 2020October 14, 2025

The Otherworldly Orbit of Jane Addams

A black-and-white photo shows a large group of men and women seated at tables in a formal dining room, engaged in conversation and eating, with ornate light fixtures overhead and wood-paneled walls.

I grew up in Illinois where the life and legacy of Jane Addams is widely known and appreciated. Illinois School children learn about Addams and Hull-House, and she is a perennial favorite topic of their book reports, term papers, and history fair essays and display boards. As a historian of Illinois history in the early years of my work, I came to know and appreciate Jane Addams at a deeper level, too, understanding better her contributions to social reform, her lobbying for protective legislation for workers, her modern arguments for woman suffrage, her importance as a philosopher, and her unwavering advocacy of world peace, even when it threatened to harm all she had built at Hull-House.

Yet the more I study the ways in which Jane Addams supported, nurtured, and inspired the women around her, and the ways in which she drew on the spirits, intellects, and achievements of those women, the more convinced I am that Jane Addams created and existed in an otherworldly orbit. An orbit where innovation and creativity and fearless determination flourished. An orbit which attracted women of myriad backgrounds and life work—educators, business women, artists, social scientists, doctors, writers, and lawyers, as well as social workers and reformers. An orbit which drew in some of the most talented and inspirational women of the era. An orbit that energized and empowered young women to find their talent and become inspirational leaders in their chosen fields and disciplines.

It was this otherworldly orbit of women that was Jane Addams’s super power.

A large group of men and women sit around several long tables in a dimly lit dining hall, engaged in conversation while eating a meal. The room has wooden walls, arched windows, and hanging light fixtures. — Hull-House Dining Hall; Jane Addams head of table at the far left, surveying her orbit.

Hull-House was a social settlement offering important educational and cultural programming for immigrants and working-class people. It was a place dedicated to social, economic, and political change to benefit all people in a society reeling from the excesses and inequalities of American industry and politics. Hull-House was also a remarkable planet of women, full of purpose and promise. And Jane Addams was the gravity that held these women together, bolstering their courage and making them so much greater than the sum of the individuals who at some point in their lives called the settlement on Halsted Street their home. Jane Addams dedicated her life to making the 19^th Ward, Chicago, her state of Illinois, the United States, and the world better places to live. That work and dedication set her apart. But I believe, this orbit of women that Jane Addams created at Hull-House was what made her truly extraordinary.

One of my greatest privileges of editing the papers of Jane Addams is daily introduction to the fascinating women in Jane Addams’s orbit. Although it is only a qualitative observation, I assert that few (if any) other institutions in American history so beautifully nourished more women to do so much good in the world than did Hull-House. I suspect this inspirational characteristic of Hull-House was in part due to Addams’s feminine, motherly or sisterly guidance of her juniors and her peers, as well as the more generous hearts of women in collaborate work. But I would also argue it was the brilliance of Jane Addams to understand that women of all backgrounds had something to offer to the narrative of reform and possessed voices worthy of projection. It was the brilliance of Jane Addams to create an atmosphere of open-minded curiosity and respectful discourse for women. It was the brilliance of Jane Addams to fill up that atmosphere with as many bright and shining female voices she could find and who could find their own way to her and to Hull-House, as well.

It would be hard to overstate the significance of the long list of extraordinary women connected with Hull-House and Jane Addams. Many of those women, like Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, and Dr. Alice Hamilton were well-known in their lifetimes and remembered by history today. One scholar likened some of those women to “stars” in a constellation around Jane Addams. I prefer to think of those female “stars” as existing in an otherworldly orbit with Jane Addams and with a breathtaking list of incredible women that history has largely forgotten. As a tribute to my joy in discovering the women in Jane Addams’s orbit and to amplify, like she did, the voices of the lessor known, I am going to offer a series of blog posts about some of the women you may not know who found their way to Hull-House and became a part of the wide influence of the settlement in the world far beyond Halsted Street.

**********

On Oct. 21, 1902, Jane Addams penned this letter:

My dear Miss Monroe
The twenty [minutes] will be perfectly convenient for us and affairs have so adjusted themselves that the little room now vacant may be yours so long as you care to keep it. The word little however is used advisedly—perhaps it would be better for you to see it before you decide on your belongings.
Faithfully yours
Jane Addams

The letter was to Harriet Monroe, a 41-year-old poet from Chicago. Monroe, who became a Hull-House resident for a brief time, delivered a public lecture about Milton on Dec. 3, 1902, at the settlement. She became a Hull-House teacher, offering an advanced class on English poetry and establishing a reading club at the settlement. Monroe was born and raised in Chicago, where her father was a successful lawyer before the Chicago Fire, after which his financial situation deteriorated. From a young age, Monroe developed a love of literature by exploring her father’s library. Although her family was not Catholic, she was educated at the Georgetown Visitation Convent in Washington, DC. In the 1880s, she lived in New York City, from where she wrote articles on the arts for the Chicago Tribune, before returning to her hometown in 1889.

In 1902, when she arrived at Hull-House, Monroe was not a well-known poet, not a household name, nor a novelist, as she had reported her occupation to the census taker in 1900. She struggled to make a literary name for herself, although she had published a few poems and penned a special verse, “The Columbian Ode” to open the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Poor health and failure to attain critical acclaim for her literary work frustrated her, but she kept writing and developed a widening circle of literary friends, which would come to include Robert Louis Stevenson, Eugene Field, Richard Watson Gilder, and Vachel Lindsay. In the years after her time at Hull-House, Monroe supported herself as a journalist, writing more than 200 articles for the Chicago Tribune, mostly on the arts, and she published sporadic freelance pieces in popular publications like Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazine. It was a meager existence, but Monroe remained committed to writing, bemoaned modern American society’s general disinterest in poetry, and began to articulate the need for poetry in American cultural life.

As was typical with most Hull-House residents who came and went, Monroe maintained her connection to the settlement and to Jane Addams years after her departure. She was a frequent guest at the settlement, made donations and offered gifts, and in 1905 wrote “The Troll’s Holiday,” an operetta set to music by Hull-House music teacher Eleanor Smith and performed at the Hull-House Music School. Over the years, the letters between Addams and Monroe reflect a respectful, friendly relationship infused with admiration and staunch support for one another’s work. In 1908, Addams wrote Monroe about her poetry: “It seems to me very remarkable, to be able to express the subtler side of the background of life as you…” In 1910, Monroe praised Addams’s latest book, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets: “It seems to me profoundly thought out and beautifully done; thought and done with fine intelligence and exquisite sympathy. Surely it will have a far-reaching affect.”

Women supporting women was the foundational characteristic of the orbit Jane Addams cultivated, and that super power of hers became the super power of other women, too. To be in Jane Addams’s orbit was to remain there, to want to stay close to the spirit of the woman, to feel the pull of the supportive energy of Hull-House, no matter the time or the distance. To have experienced Jane Addams’s orbit was to wish to create your own orbit of inclusion and support and purpose beyond the self.

I suspect Harriet Monroe either learned at Hull-House the lesson of going beyond yourself and connecting your talents to others, or while there she practiced the lesson which was already in her own heart. Because ultimately, Harriet Monroe’s greatest contribution was not her own poetry but rather her fierce support of the art form and the poetry of others. At the age of 52, Monroe conceived of the idea to create an American journal of poetry, to seek out great poets and good work, and promote that work in the pages of a popular magazine. In October 1912, Monroe published the first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. When she launched the magazine, Monroe sent Jane Addams a complimentary subscription. Addams would not have it, however, writing in reply: “I am not in the least willing to have my name stand on an honorary list. Please let me send the enclosed and assure you that I have seldom subscribed to a magazine with more pleasure.”

Poetry was an immediate critical and popular success. For the remainder of her life, Monroe edited the magazine, raising American interest in poetry and launching the careers of many of America’s greatest poets, like Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot. Eighty-four years after Monroe’s death in 1936, Poetry magazine is still in publication, still a venue for new poets, still a vehicle for a great American art form. Hull-House and Jane Addams may or may not have directly inspired Monroe’s direction in life. I dare not give either the credit for Monroe’s brilliant vision and stunning contribution to modern American poetry. But in reading more and more stories of the lives of people who were in the orbit of the woman and the settlement, even for very short periods of time, one cannot dismiss the excellence of that orbit, either in what it may have inspired or the inspirational figures it drew into its remarkable sphere of influence.

Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sources: Eleanor J. Stebner, The Women of Hull House: A Study in Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, eds., Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 598-600; “Monroe, Harriet,” American National Biography; 1900 U.S. Federal Census; Hull-House Bulletin, 5 (Semi-Annual, 1902, no. 2), 3-10, passim, Jane Addams Papers, Microfilm Edition (JAPM), 53:1156-63, passim; Hull-House Bulletin, 7 (1905-1906), 18, JAPM, 53:1231; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, October 21, 1902; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, May 13, 1905; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, June 27, 1905; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, May 23, 1908; Harriet Monroe to Jane Addams, January 31, 1910; Jane Addams to Harriet Monroe, December 2. 1912; all in Jane Addams Digital Edition. Images courtesy of Poetry Magazine, the Poetry Foundation, and Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Chicago. Click this link to explore the correspondence between Jane Addams and Harriet Monroe.

September 11, 2020July 23, 2026

Democratizing the Arts and Crafts Movement: Jane Addams and Hull-House as A Lever for Social reform

A sepia-toned portrait of a woman with short hair, gazing thoughtfully at the camera, her hand resting under her chin. She wears dark clothing and appears pensive against a plain background.

This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz on September 11, 2020.

Jane Addams was one of the most well-known and influential women reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She founded the Hull-House, a social settlement that became a leader in the new field of social work; she won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931 redeeming her reputation which had been attacked because of her pacifism during World War I; and she was a prominent suffragist representing politically organized women nationwide . She advised presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a writer of ten books and co-author of two more, hundreds of magazine and journal articles, as a lecturer and campaigner, what Addams said about democracy, the labor question, and international affairs had weight. One of the less known contributions of Addams, however, is in the field of cultural work. And that is our subject today. When we urge friendship and inclusion of newcomers to the American shores, when we valorize the contributions of diverse cultural backgrounds and admire traditional crafts, when we speak about making the motto: “one out of many” a fact of life, when we campaign for art and music in our public schools, we are validating the ideas and cultural pedagogy of Addams and her colleagues at Hull-House.

Today I want to tell you something about the history of Hull-House from 1889 to 1935, a settlement house located on Chicago’s Near West Side, a dense, industrial neighborhood populated by immigrant workers. Our focus is on the role of arts and crafts. Many of you will have an image of the Lower East Side of New York —as a congested tenement and sweatshop neighborhood filled with newly arrived immigrants. Hull-House was in Chicago’s “port of entry” neighborhood where immigrants found cheap accommodations having arrived at the railroad depots nearby. These photos make the point that Addams made when she thought that housing reform would be easier in Chicago than in New York, where tenements were taller and denser.

Historic black-and-white photo showing people walking on a snowy city street, with several buildings in the background, including the Hull-House settlement and a saloon. Likely taken in 1909 during winter.

Black-and-white photo of people outside an Italian pharmacy and drugstore on a street corner, with signs for cigars and newspapers. Early 1900s urban setting with surrounding buildings and a man sitting on a bench.

Settlement houses were community centers unlike charities or welfare bureaus. They were run by educated middle-to-upper-middle-class women and men who believed they could attack the worst aspects of industrialism and the chaos and ugliness of slum neighborhoods by bringing culture to the people in these neighborhoods.

The movement grew in American cities where by 1911 there were 400 settlement houses. By developing friendships with their neighbors, offering art and music classes, lectures and exhibitions they would “lift up the masses” and inspire an awakening that would have political and social transformative power. Soon Hull-House became a laboratory for teacher training, offered medical clinics, pioneered community and little theatre productions and became a think-tank initiating sociological and public health research projects. It lent its influence for the suffrage movement, to campaigns to outlaw child labor, and to efforts at mediating disputes between labor and capital.

Overall, the cultural programs remained the constant and most all-engrossing of the settlement’s offerings. Specifically, arts and crafts were made accessible to the neighborhood and the initial impulse of bringing art to the people turned into a much more complicated exchange where the people’s art and the canonical European heritage of art were brought together. A sign of this effort to re-think cultural production in an industrial democracy heavily influenced by the different traditions of its immigrants is the event that occurred in 1904 at the Annual arts and crafts exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago. It may well have gone unnoticed by many who visited the Art Institute. It may have had greater effect back in the neighborhood from whence the exhibited object derived: it was the inclusion into a prestigious exhibition of the work of highly trained artisans worldwide of a textile designed and handmade on a traditional loom by an Irish immigrant who came to Hull-House’s weaving room to practice her craft. This was noted quite simply in the show’s catalogue that listed Mrs. Brosnahan as the creator of a textile on display.

Left: A large room with several spinning wheels and chairs. Right: An older woman in period clothing using a spinning wheel in front of a brick fireplace.

Honora Brosnahan was a housewife in the neighborhood; she frequently displayed her skill in Irish spinning to visitors from among the neighbors and others from far and wide who flocked to the settlement house on Saturday evenings where in the workrooms they encountered neighborhood people, often dressed in the clothing of their native lands, performing ancient crafts.[1]

They might hear a lecture on the history of the technique—spinning, weaving, woodworking–or the history of the materials used. There might be accompanying music –folk or classic that spoke to the plight of workers such as “The Sweat-shop Song” composed by Eleanor Smith, head of the settlement’s Music School; and on the workshop walls there would be additional displays of handicrafts, tools, and even reproductions of genre paintings by European masters depicting artisans. at work or farmers in the fields chosen by Enella Benedict, artist-in-residence and head of the Art School at Hull-House.

For Addams it must have been a satisfying moment to enter Mrs. Brosnahan’s textile into the exhibit, a moment that she could relish as a realization of a major goal of the settlement. She had managed to create cultural space in which an immigrant woman’s skills were affirmed in her adopted homeland; her craft was valorized and included in a serious exhibition in the major museum of the Middle West. Her children and neighbors could see her valued in this downtown context as well as in the neighborhood space thereby knitting together the generations that had been upheaved by transplantation. This quiet cultural event spoke volumes and was key to Addams’s prescription for the social healing she believed was necessary for the growth of a new social ethic and a new respect for difference, for history, and for progress and the interconnectedness of humanity. This was happening at a time when fear of the stranger, the rise of race theories and the rhetoric of a nativist politics of exclusion was spreading in the land.

At Hull-House, the major settlement in the U. S. and the first to open in Chicago, two groups developed and interacted through art:

The first group was the colony of American-born and privileged women and men led by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr—college friends. They had visited Toynbee Hall, the first social experiment of its kind, in the East London slum and in their minds their desires to find ethically useful work, to share culture with those less fortunate, and to live democratically among the people cohered in the example of the Oxford college men who had joined Canon Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta to work among London’s most disadvantaged.

Jane and Ellen decided they would use the former’s inheritance and the latter’s Chicago social and cultural connections—and open an American version of the English Toynbee Hall. The two young women were a sensation in Chicago, heralded by the city’s cultural and philanthropic elites and in less than five years of existence, Hull-House was on the list of attractions visitors to the Columbian Exposition in 1893 were told to view. Englishman William T. Stead—maverick journalist, moralist, and critic of industrialization famously wrote at the conclusion of the World’s Fair, that If Christ Came to Chicago (in a book by that title)—he would be most comfortable in the colony of humanitarians that had gathered at Hull-House to live among the poorest and most oppressed.[2]

Two black-and-white portraits: left, Jane Addams in 1889 with hair tied back; right, Ellen Gates Starr circa 1889 with curly hair, both wearing high-collared dresses. Text identifies them as Hull-House founders.

This brings us to the second group at Hull-House: The second group were the neighbors, in the beginning those Irish and German immigrant families already English-speaking, then Italians, Jews, and Greeks. Among them were Honora Brosnahan, Michael Gamboney, Jose Torres, and Nick Fosco and many others —– The two groups interacted and learned from each other in many positive ways. Yet the urban planning goals of transforming the neighborhood never materialized. However, the settlement “ideal” of a democratic cosmopolitanism and neighborliness represented best through the arts and cultural work succeeded in reaching many neighbors. As one Hull-House “boy,” now grown-up put it: “Hull-House showed us another way of living.” Jane Addams, in one of her more critical reflections, thought she had reached mostly “the transfigured few” not the masses.[3]

Three black-and-white photos: a teacher guides a child at pottery, a man shapes clay at a pottery wheel, and another man focuses on sculpting clay, each captioned with their journey in the Hull-House Art School.

Left: A woman holding bundles of garments stands outside a building. Right: An elderly woman sits in a chair indoors, surrounded by framed photos and art on the wall.

In a larger sense there were other successes. One of the major accomplishments is the acceptance of the importance of the arts in public schools, the acknowledgement that children need creative play and exposure to art, music, performance—and not just the children of the privileged in society, but those from all neighborhoods, all cultures, all economic classes. These ideas that we take for granted today, even when we fail to fully fulfill them, have become the measure of a compassionate, humane society. In addition, and equally important, the narrative told by Jane Addams in her writings, which are still in print and read, interpret the immigration story in a positive light and we learn how important immigrant’s cultural contributions have been to the American culture. Scholars have identified Addams and Hull-House with significant innovations of our educational institutions, our ideas about child development, art and occupational therapy, recreational therapy, criminology, and the field of social work.

Art and Labor

Chicago noticed the transformation of the interior space of the old Hull homestead where Jane and Ellen were launching their settlement house. Allen B. Pond, of Pond & Pond Architects, had aided the two women in locating the once-stately building as an ample place to begin their cultural work. His pen and ink drawing is one of the earliest images we have and shows the initial two-story additional building, known as the Butler Building, that Pond designed. The interior images illustrate the influences of Ruskin and Morris, and others we associate with the movement that argued for a moral aesthetic accessible to the working classes. T. C. Horsfall’s experiments with loaning art reproductions to the working classes of Manchester, England, would be tried here at Hull-House.

Four black-and-white photos of Hull-House interiors: a nursery with children, a parlor with a piano, a library, and a reception area, with descriptive text on the right side.

Allen Pond recognized kindred spirits in Addams and Starr. He remained their faithful architect for the twelve additional buildings of the settlement complex and he served as a trustee of the Hull-House Association until his death. It goes without saying that he is one of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society.

Two men in suits stand side by side in an old black-and-white photo. They are indoors with framed pictures on the wall behind them. Both look at the camera, with one slightly blurred.

At the same time that the two women enticed Edward Butler, wealthy businessman, art collector, and a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, to donate $5,000 for the construction of the new building architect Pond was planning to adjoin the old settlement house for art exhibits, art studios, and a library, the colony of Hull-House residents had gotten deeply involved in the anti-sweatshop movement in Illinois. A cross-class campaign had been mounted when sensational articles exposed sweatshop conditions where women and children were working. There were demands for legislation to clean up the horrible tenement workshops and impose an 8-hour workday for women workers. Labor leaders, socialists, clubwomen, and religious leaders found in Addams, Starr, and a new Hull-House resident, Florence Kelley, inspiration and organization. This seemed to thrust the group far from the cultural evenings in which Ellen Starr read George Eliot’s Romola or lectured on art history or the work of the Chicago Public School Art Society of which she was President.

Watercolor rendering of early Hull-House and Butler Art Gallery, circa 1890. Street scene with people walking and horse-drawn carriage. Buildings have detailed architecture and fencing.

Starr asks rhetorically in her contribution to the settlement’s first publication, Hull-House Maps & Papers, (and I paraphrase here) is it ethical and practical to launch an expensive art gallery building in the midst of this struggle for survival among the garment workers in the neighborhood? She argues that there is a connection between the two movements, what later union women would sing out poetically in the phrase “give us bread and give us roses”—and that a society that has no justice for workers has no foundation to produce authentic art.

Black-and-white photo of an art gallery room with sculptures, paintings, wooden chairs, and a table at Hull-House Settlement, circa 1895.

From the beginning Starr and Addams determined to involve themselves in the art and the politics of social change. This dual approach was possible because of the dedication of the group of cultural workers who joined them, some living and working at Hull-House for four decades. In this manner, Addams and Starr were constructing a non-elitist, differently gendered version of the artist in her or his studio. One example is Artist Enella Benedict, wealthy daughter of a manufacturer and real estate developer, had studied in Europe and taught at the art school of the Art Institute of Chicago. She chose to run an art school in the settlement and paint in a studio she shared with aspiring artists who lived in the neighborhood. She remained with Addams until her death, also teaching from time to time at the Art Institute, but deeply imbedded in the collaborative cultural work of the settlement where she designed and painted theater scenery and tableaux vivants that depicted classical Western religious art themes. She received no salary. Of course she could escape for vacations to the New England coast or Europe. But her paintings reflected the pull of the immigrant neighborhood she called her own. Two slides show paintings done by Benedict: one, the portrait of “Edith” a local Irish Catholic girl; and the misty pastel-like line of workers waiting.

Left: A painted portrait of a woman in a yellow dress. Right: A black-and-white photo of an art studio, easels, chairs, and artwork, including a portrait in progress matching the painting.

Addams and Starr were joined by artists, musicians, craftspeople, radicals and socialists who foresaw a soulless society with the deskilling of craft workers and the alienation of the masses into wage slaves. These bright, engaged women and men were disciples of John Ruskin, William Morris; some were Christian Socialists, others were influenced by Marx and Engels. From the start they performed a cultural pedagogy heavily tied to ideas of the trans-Atlantic arts and crafts movement. It is surprising that it took them eight years to launch the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts in 1897, for from the start cultural work was at the very center of the enterprise.

The society’s aims were wide ranging: cultivating in its members and others a sense of beauty, encouraging beauty in articles produced for everyday use, influencing the manual-training movement and the design and decoration of both useful and ornamental objects, encouraging handicrafts, studying factory conditions with a view to reducing the dominance of the machine, and holding exhibits and founding centers for crafts activities. The society sponsored lectures on topics such as art education, the Arts and Crafts movement, the role of art in society, and specific crafts and held an annual exhibit, usually in November. Perhaps the society’s best-known lecturer was member Frank Lloyd Wright, who spoke March 6, 1901, on “Art and the Machine,” concluding that art was needed to give a soul to the machine. Charles Ashbee was prescient in seeing Chicago’s unique approach to arts and crafts in the acceptance of the machine and the attempt to humanize the product and the production so that worker and consumer would benefit rather than suffer from technology.

Membership in the society included wealthy businessmen Edward B. Butler and William R. Hutchinson—both trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as trustees of the Hull-House settlement. Allen B. Pond with his brother Irving, participated in that cross-over between aesthetic and social reform that characterized the Chicago society’s approach. Frank Hazen [Hazenplug] was a staff artist at Stone & Kimball who designed for both the Chapbook and the Hull House shops. He also worked with the Hull-House Theater and taught metalwork. He later headed the metalwork at the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony in Woodstock, New York. Byrdcliffe had a strong connection to the Hull-House arts and crafts group.[4] Artist Carl Eric Lindin, born in Sweden, [5] emigrated to Chicago and studied painting at the Art Institute and in Paris, became a resident artist at Hull-House where he met the Photo-secessonist photographer Eva Watson-Schutze and the Byrdcliffe, artists and craftsmen who overlapped with many of the Hull House group.[6] George Herbert Twose of Hull-House, was an Englishman who taught manual training in the public schools and woodworking at the Hull House shops, and was the first president of the Society.[7]

Strongly influenced by the arts and crafts movement, the New England artist Jessie Luther began her crafts career as director of the Labor Museum at Hull House, Chicago, at the invitation of Addams.[8] Adeline Titsworth worked in the Labor Museum and taught weaving classes.[9]

With the help of Eleanor Smith, the founder and director of the Hull-House Music School, Myrtle French, founder and director of the Hull-House Kilns, Edith de Nancrede, director of children’s drama and dance, and Laura Dainty Pelham, director of the Hull-House Players, one of the first Little Theatre Groups in the country, and Enella Benedict, head of the Art School at the settlement Addams and Starr experimented and evolved cultural pedagogies. They did so with the goal of developing a democratic and cosmopolitan ethos that unified cultural, religious, and socio-economic differences. I mention these women because it was no coincidence that the Hull-House model of cultural production was gendered differently from the membership and leadership of the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts, which was from the start overwhelmingly male. The goals of the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts and the departments of the settlement overlapped. Perhaps it was the marginalization of women in the arts that drove the Hull-House women to establish innovative institutional structures from which to launch themselves in order to be “eligible” in the eyes of the male custodians of culture to lead the society.

A sepia-toned painting shows a line of men in hats and coats waiting outside a building in an urban setting, conveying a somber mood of economic hardship.

Forty years later, Hull-House itself had been transformed into a place of production—a pottery and ceramics business employing the Mexicans now living in the neighborhood. The dishware provided the model for the commercially successful and popular Fiesta dinnerware.[10] Industrial shops and workrooms, a school that taught textile weaving; dressmaking; a printing press, and with the infusion of New Deal monies, expanded studios and workshops teaching arts and crafts and industrial vocations. The machine was a reality but Hull-House attempted to contextualize its usage visually and performatively in the unique Labor Museum. This evolution reflects Addams’s and Starr’s goal of democratizing arts and crafts—an evolution that can be expressed as a transformation of the concept of bringing art to the people to the implementation of creating cultural space where the people had a direct role as cultural workers for themselves.

From 1895 until 1900, when the Labor Museum was opened, there was a progression toward creating space at Hull-House for neighborhood people to work in industrial shops and at handicrafts while the colony of resident artists also flourished.[11] This was the heyday of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull-House. The society’s aims were wide ranging: cultivating in its members and others a sense of beauty, encouraging beauty in articles produced for everyday use, influencing the manual-training movement and the design and decoration of both useful and ornamental objects, encouraging handicrafts, studying factory conditions with a view to reducing the dominance of the machine, and holding exhibits and founding centers for crafts activities.

The society sponsored lectures on topics such as art education, the Arts and Crafts movement, the role of art in society, and specific crafts and held an annual exhibit, usually in November. Perhaps the society’s best-known lecturer was member Frank Lloyd Wright, who spoke March 6, 1901, on “Art and the Machine,” concluding that art was needed to give a soul to the machine. Charles Ashbee was prescient in seeing Chicago’s unique approach to arts and crafts in the acceptance of the machine and the attempt to humanize the product and the production so that worker and consumer would benefit rather than suffer from technology.

Searching for a Way to Democratize Arts and Crafts

Jane Addams and Ellen Starr were never satisfied with the programs Hull-House had established in the humanities, the fine, arts, and the performing arts. The major goal was to democratize culture as a necessary stage in the evolution of society. This meant devising ways to transmit quality humanities education outside of universities to the working people in their neighborhoods and to the public schools.[12]

Black-and-white sketch of a workshop corner with a stove, shelves of books, framed art, and various tools. Caption describes it as Ellen Gates Starr’s book bindery at Hull-House Labor Museum, around 1902.

Ellen Gates Starr’s evolving pursuits in the labor movement and in the shops modeled this conception more than any of the other resident artists. She was also the resident who experienced the most inner turmoil and conflict over the relationship of art and labor. Initially Starr followed the arts and crafts movement closely. She began bookbinding “with the goal of unifying mental and manual labor and contributing in some small way to the beauty of objects” and in pursuit of this goal she spent a total of 15 months—12 in 1897 and 3 in 1899—at Doves Bindery in England, where she was one of the few American women to apprentice with T. J. Cobden-Sanderson.”[13]

Ellen Starr was a discordant voice from the start. She did not agree completely with the direction that Hull-House settlement was taking. It seemed Starr almost immediately felt the contradictions that Addams later alluded to when she wrote “how difficult it . . . [was] to put a fringe of art on the end of a day spent in a factory.”[14] Ironically, the contradictions were to become most obvious to Starr in the way her own work in the Labor Museum’s book bindery seemed at times irrelevant to her actual labor union activities and socialist politics. She rationalized that her work provided opportunity, albeit limited, to illustrate products of unalienated work and that in her bindery she was demonstrating work done in the “’spirit of the future’—that is, in a spirit allowing for self-expression.” [15] In 1892, Starr had accused Hull-House of being merely “an excuse for the things we ought to do and be and don’t and aren’t.”[16] She worried about the contradictions of offering bourgeois culture to workers but not sharing power with them. “If we don’t wish working people to stand upon the same ground with us, if we believe that there is an eternal distinction, if we believe in caste, no matter how we disguise it, then why shouldn’t we let them alone? Why insult people by saying to them, ‘you are different, you will be different always, you can never be as we, knowing false and true, beautiful and ugly, but we wish to be kind to you, we want you to enjoy in your poor capacity, what you are capable of enjoying, and so we come and give you this and this.'”[17]

Four black-and-white photos: Ellen Starrs campaign card; Starr at a desk being booked by Chicago Police; Starr working in a bindery; Mary Kelly, her apprentice, also in the bindery.

Starr’s 1895 contribution, “Art and Labor,” discussed earlier, was anti-capitalist and anti-modernist in tone. Starr had warned that it was not enough to fight for wages, you had also to fight for the soul of man against the commercial and industrial world that was crushing him. She was uncomfortable with an elitist argument that an educated and cultivated class should guide the tastes of the uncultivated but succumbed to such an arrangement. The Chicago Public School Art Society, born out of Starr’s determination to bring objects of beauty into all the places she could, was a top-down organization that assumed the role of arbiter of taste and disseminator of bourgeois art. The activities in the Labor Museum, the arrangement of artifacts, and the interpretation of the presentations were controlled by Hull-House residents and staff.

Two black-and-white photos show old workshop rooms with wooden beams, chairs, and worktables, displaying equipment and tools. Caption reads: The Labor Museum and Industrial Shops.

Starr’s own complicated feelings about her loyalties surfaced as she began to feel a closer relationship to the working class and to those bright, ambitious young men and women who were attempting to better themselves. One of the great differences between Addams and Starr was that of their class positions. Issues of financial dependence had plagued Starr from her college days when she was able to complete only one year while Addams remained to finish college. Starr taught school and dreamt of more ambitious plans living on her own in the big city of Chicago. Jane always had the upper hand as a young woman of wealth and superior rank. The imbalance and dependency between them was understood by both women.”[18]

Addams drifted toward institution-building, an interest not shared by Starr whose bindery room seemed to offer scant comfort but, rather, felt incomplete as she imagined a socialist cooperative workshop buzzing with activity. Starr’s frustrations with teaching bookbinding and with the slow progress made in advancing the overall cultural and economic interests of the working class were further exacerbated by her basic disagreement with Addams about the need for revolutionary change in the social system. For Starr, nothing short of a religiously-inspired radical conversion to communitarian or socialist values would address the deep injustices caused by capitalism. Like her hero, William Morris, Starr married her own artistic expression and belief in socialism only to find that the contradictions were too dramatic. Expensive materials and long years’ training achieved great art at a cost beyond the means of workers. Ultimately, Starr was only able to train a handful of students in the craft[19] and the cultural world inhabited by artists and artisans in which she traveled and in which she exhibited her decorative and expensive rare books was becoming increasingly more remote from the picket lines she also inhabited in support of striking garment workers and waitresses.[20]

A collage shows people spinning and weaving in a textile room with various traditional machines. The central photo is a large workshop; surrounding images show individuals using spinning wheels and looms.

Starr’s discomfort with the contradictions that were expressed in the way the settlement movement developed did not cause her to break with Addams, or to give up fine art book binding or even change her ideas about cultural pedagogy.[21] As historian Suellen Hoy informs us “Until she closed her bindery in the 1920s, Starr earned a good part of her living by binding and ornamenting books.” [22]

At the same time her radicalism was becoming more public. On March 6, 1914, at age fifty-five, Starr was arrested and brought to trial on a charge of disorderly conduct stemming from her behavior on the picket line at a waitresses’ strike in Chicago.[23] She had shouted at the police, who she believed had unjustly arrested three waitresses on picket duty, “I am a citizen and as such protest this arrest.” The crowd became excited and it was reported that they shouted: “Kill the police.” After eight hours’ deliberation, a jury found her innocent.[24]

Starr’s plunge into a deeper and more catholic devotional life that served to pull her out of recurring emotional depressions, was also an expression of her lifelong search for fellowship and salvation.[25] In contrast to Addams, Starr was searching for something close to a sacramental community, a version of “social holiness” beyond “personal holiness” that would also reconcile her individuality as an artist with her desire to identify with workers.[26] Shortly after the Garment Workers’ Strike in 1910 Starr had joined the Socialist Party, and fit in with the Marxist, hard-line, predominantly immigrant organization. Although middle-class social workers were discouraged from joining, by 1915 Starr was serving on the Cook County Socialist Party’s executive committee.[27]

She did this even while deepening her commitment to Christianity. For Starr, her labor union radicalism seemed to draw her more deeply into her faith, or perhaps, the arduous task of standing up for the workers against the wealthy and powerful could only be endured by her through the strength of her religious convictions. It was her vision of the implementation of the social gospel here on earth that continued to inspire and sustain her as much as the realities of oppressive conditions stirred her rebellion. She ran unsuccessfully for alderman of the Nineteenth Ward as a socialist in 1916.

Jane Addams and Industrial Education: Contextualizing Factory Work and Elevating Craft at the Labor Museum

Starr remained conflicted about the craftsman ideal and attempts at cultural expression by working people in the top-down and controlled atmosphere of Hull-House and moved further into the trenches of class warfare. Addams moved toward institutionalizing cultural production and the settlement ideal of social amelioration as the answer to industrial conflict. She identified this as much more than the conflict between labor and capital in the workplace. Addams saw the disintegration of traditional family life, especially among immigrants, as intergenerational conflict exacerbated by the too-early employment of children and adolescents, and further negatively impacted by the attractions of popular culture. The museum’s workrooms and classes became models she used in advocating industrial and vocational education.

Addams was critical of the public schools and she questioned whether anything had been done to give boys who stayed in school until the required age of fourteen a consciousness of their social value. Instead she envisioned public schools as social centers that dealt with the larger issue of socializing work. She lobbied for curriculum to bridge the gap between traditional customs and youth’s embrace of popular culture by valorizing craftsmanship, folk music and dance, and theater of the immigrant generation and developing historical perspective while at the same time learning science, hygiene, and household skills for urban living. [28]

Work was at the center of the Labor Museum not as an antiquarian obsession with craft, as latter-day pro-labor New Dealers[29] would contend, but as an approach to socialize and humanize industrial occupations. Addams had become aware of the realities of workers’ families’ lives just as Starr. Central to her concern was the woeful inadequacy of educational preparation for workers’ children.[30] Workers’ children rarely attended high schools and for students who had no intention of attending college, high schools offered little in the way of training for jobs anyway. At the same time, families encouraged their post-grammar school sons and daughters to find whatever work was available. To Addams the long-range outcomes of this custom were dire, consigning young people to lives of insecure employment, low wages, and the sort of hollowness of spirit that led to negative habits and even criminal activity as the culture of the streets provided gratification.[31]

Three black-and-white photos of people weaving on looms, illustrating younger generations engaging in traditional weaving practices from diverse cultures.

A woman operates a spinning wheel while a man stands beside a large loom with woven fabric, in a workshop with patterned textiles hanging on the wall.

Classes and apprenticeship training became important pieces of the programs offered at Hull-House, part of a complicated equation that balanced demonstrations by immigrants “performed” to develop intergenerational understanding and respect of old world customs with the new vocational knowledge that aided first and second generation daughters and sons to enter the American economic system. Addams’s views of vocational guidance and industrial curriculum differed from both the plans put forward by business interests and those developed by organized labor precisely in this idea of connecting current skill learning with the history and art of craft. [32]

Instead Addams incorporated the immigrant women and men who regularly “performed” their artistry and crafts in the Labor Museum, in the education of young boys and girls. This was an innovation pedagogically. The elders took on young men and women as “apprentices.” The products of the work were made available for sale, with the same split between the House and the artisan. There are no statistics to measure how much any artisan “earned” or how many students transitioned into a permanent industrial job. The dissemination of the craftsman ideal to the youth of the neighborhood was much more important to Addams than running industrial shops that saw a profit or adapting youth to fit the specific employment needs of industry. [33]

Three black and white photos show people engaged in hands-on industrial and arts education, with a quote highlighting Jane Addams support for vocational learning and crafts in the humanities context.

The Labor Museum and Industrial Shops were inaugurated by Addams at the peak of the arts and crafts movement in Chicago and at a time when “exhibition” to educate the public on industrial conditions, model housing, and municipal planning was a key strategy of reformers and practitioners of the new fields of sanitation, urban planning, and public health.[34] It was also a period in which middle-class native born Americans were not convinced that the “New Immigrants” were assimilable. The charts that demonstrated the continuity and similarity of craft in the history of industry also depicted universality among the different ethnic groups whose techniques were both culturally specific and part of the universal story. There was a positive response from middle-class visitors, a key piece in Addams’s agenda. Addams expanded programs, added classes, and collected more artifacts and encouraged the collaboration of all the other departments of the settlement house in this pursuit of an educational medium that would successfully connect immigrants and their children in a positive way to the long history of industrialism, and as well, connect Americans with their new neighbors.

Two people place bricks into a large kiln at Hull-House, preparing it for production. Stacks of bricks are in front of the kiln, and one person is looking inside while the other hands over a brick.

Hull-House used art to advocate for democratic principles, to teach democratic values by living up to the highest standards of conduct with respect to the rights of others; and to encourage the broadest, most inclusive cultural as well as civic engagement of the whole community. Long before the New Deal programs for theater and art inaugurated a period of intense public support for the arts in a democracy, Addams critiqued the narrow eighteenth century notion of democracy as being equated almost entirely with representation through voting, and sought to make democracy relevant to the cultural needs of the masses.

A man stands behind a table displaying handcrafted pottery, including bowls and a decorative plate, in a workshop. Text below describes Mexican artisans teaching pottery at Hull-House in 1927.

Assorted colorful ceramic bowls and pots are arranged in a group. A caption explains their origin and connection to Fiesta Ware.

[1] Here I have not the time to interrogate the authenticity of traditional craftwork of the neighbors. In my chapters in Eleanor Smith’s Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams’s Chicago co-authored with Graham Cassano and Jennifer Payette (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020), I deal with the more complicated performance of craft that went on. I called it constructed craftsmanship. See, Eleanor Smith, 278.

[2] William T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Union of All who Love in the Service of All who Suffer (Review of Reviews: 1894).

[3] Graham Cassano, Rima Lunin Schultz, and Jessica Payette, Eleanor Smith’s Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams’s Chicago (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020), 170.

[4] Nancy E. Green, Byrdcliffe: An American Arts and Crafts Colony. Ithaca, New York: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2004 catalog, 231.

[5] “From Sweden to Woodstock: The Art and Career of Carl Eric Lindin” by Tom Wolf. Catalogue: David Cook Fine Art, Denver, Colorado, 2005, 5.

[6] “From Sweden to Woodstock” 5-10. In 1904 Lindin exhibited thirty-two paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. He married Louise Hastings in 1911; she was the daughter of a wealthy banker and civil engineer and was part of the Hull-House circle. She learned bookbinding from Ellen Starr. Carl and Louise wed at Hull-House. (Wolf, 10.) Louise Lindin worked on her bookbinding as well as weaving and sewing. (Wolf, 11.)“In 1911 he [Lindin] had an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago consisting of thirty-eight paintings, all landscapes.” (12) In 1923 and 1924 Carl and Louise spent the winters in Ojai, California, where they taught at the Ojai Valley School, founded by their old Hull-House friend, Ed Yeomans. (Wolf, 16.) Note: Lindin painted a portrait of Jane Addams and also one of Hervey White.

[7] Listed “In Memoriam,” Hull-House Residents 1889-1929. Note: Bruce Robert Kahler, “Art and Life: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Chicago, 1897-1910,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Purdue University, August 1986, lists Twose as the secretary of the Arts and Crafts Society. However, Eileen Boris, Art and Labor, says that George Twose was the society’s first president (pp. 45-46) and that its secretary was Ellen [Ella Raymond] Waite.

[8] In 1906, she was recruited by Dr Wilfred Grenfell, the medical missionary, to teach weaving to women at St Anthony, a small community at the northern tip of Newfoundland, and for four years she painstakingly laid the groundwork for a variety of craft industries. Jessie Luther at the Grenfell Mission is an annotated edition of a travel journal that Luther wrote from 1906 to 1910. Edited by Ronald Rompkey, author of the most authoritative biography of Grenfell, Luther’s journal provides an unusually intimate account of Wilfred Grenfell during these four years.

[9] “Occupations of the Residents of Hull-House,” 1935-36. She is listed in Hull-House Yearbook Forty-Fifth Year.

[10]

[11] Vincent L. Michael, “Recovering the Layout of the Hull House Complex,” Urban Experience in Chicago: Touring the Buildings: Inside The Complex, http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/urbanexp (Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum website, UIC.

[12] Jane Addams, “Labor Museum at Hull House,” Current Literature Oct. 1900, Vol. XXIX, No. 4; American Periodicals Online, p. 423.

[13] Mary Ann Stankiewiez, “Art at Hull House, 1889-1901: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr.” Woman’s Art Journal (Spring-Summer 1989), vol. 10, No. 1, 37.

[14] Jane Addams, Twenty Years, 375. Addams, however, proudly displayed the arts and crafts produced in the shops at the 3rd annual exhibit of arts and crafts held at the Chicago Art Institute: Catalogue, Third Annual Exhibition of Original Designs for Decorations and Examples of Art Crafts having Distinct Artistic Merit, The Art Institute of Chicago, December 6 to December 21, 1904, 53-55.

[15] Starr quoted in Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 180.

[16] Elizabeth Palmer Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror: The Progressive Woman and the Settlement Experience,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 1981, 30.

[17] “Chicago’s Hull House.” Report on an Address by Ellen Starr, 1895, Hull-House Scrapbook, III, JAMC, Spec. Col. Daley Library, UIC.

[18] “I have thought of the possibility of my dying [before] the experiment [Hull-House settlement] is in full sway,” Addams wrote her sister Alice. “As Ellen has given up her regular teaching and trusts all her future to the affair, I should like her to be given $1500.00 enough to support her for a year or more until she could get back into her regular work. I have now made a will and . . . know you would see to that for me.”[18] Jane Addams to Sarah Alice Addams Haldeman, August 31, 1889, JAP reel 2-1079-1080.

[19] In 1904 Starr’s pupils Peter Verburg and Mary Kelley exhibited bound volumes: Catalogue, Third Annual Exhibition of Original Designs for Decorations and Examples of Art Crafts having Distinct Artistic Merit, The Art Institute of Chicago, December 6 to December 21, 1904, 53-55.

[20] Starr was one of the founding members of the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts. Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 33, 45-46. When the arts and crafts community, Byrdcliffe, was established in Woodstock, New York, in 1902, Starr was a visitor. Nancy E. Green, “Byrdcliffe and the ‘Dream of Somewhere,’” The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 –the Present. No. 28, ARTS & CRAFTS ISSUE (2004), pp. 56-81.

[21] Starr reconciled to her displacement by Mary Rozet Smith as Addams’s partner and remained in residence at Hull-House until 1930, when illness forced her to relocate. Even then Addams and Starr remained deeply attached. Rima L. Schultz, “Smith, Mary Rozet,” in Women Building Chicago, 817-819.

[22] “Fine Work in Binding Books,” Chicago Chronicle, Apr. 22, 1900, 19; Suellen Hoy, Ellen Gates Starr. Her Later Years (Chicago: Chicago History Museum, 2010,) 5-7. Starr was a talented bookbinder and her work was exhibited along with the top artisans in the field. One of her best students, Peter Verburg, went on to have an outstanding career. Boris, 181.

[23] This was the Waitresses’ union strikes against the downtown Chicago popular restaurant, Henrici’s, that began in February of 1914: “Girl Pickets Open Boycott Fight on 35 Cafes in Loop,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 6, 1014, pg. 13; “Ellen G. Starr’s Trial on Today,” Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1914, pg. 7. Suellen Hoy indicates Starr’s public activism troubled her fellow Hull-House residents. Suellen Hoy, Ellen Gates Starr. Her Later Years (Chicago: Chicago History Museum, 2010), 16-17.

[24] Carrell, 357-358. Lila Weinberg, “Wilmarth, Mary J. Hawes, “in Women Building Chicago, 982-986.

[25] Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror,” 398-400. Starr to Wager, Hull-House, Feb. 12, 1917, Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Box VIII, Smith College. Among her periods of depression, in 1896, after a garment workers’ strike, the first in which she was actively involved, Starr became exhausted and left for New York for a prolonged period. In 1907 she collapsed from nervous exhaustion, spent a month in a sanitarium, and spent 1908 abroad, living in relative isolation on a farm in Ireland. For her conversion to Roman Catholicism, see: Starr, “A Bypath into the Great Roadway,” Catholic World vol. 119, May 1924.

[26] Ellen G. Starr, “College Settlement Work: Hull-House,” 4^th paper published by the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross [Adelynrood, Byfield, Massachusetts: 1895], 1-3. Starr most likely was disappointed in the other group to which she attempted to meld art and labor: the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts. Historian Eileen Boris found that “By 1910 it [the Chicago Society for Arts and Crafts] had dwindled to 26 members, who concentrated on running their own studio-shops rather than promoting cooperative ventures. Crafts workers increasingly were alumni of the School of the Art Institute, which had replaced Hull House as the center of the movement in Chicago. With this shift, the crafts—while flourishing as profession, personal avocation, and part of an appealing lifestyle—lost their more intimate relation to the reform impulse.” Boris, Art and Labor, p. 51.

[27] Carrell, 357.

[28] Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, “The Politics of Vocationalism: Coalitions and Industrial Education in the Progressive Era,” The Historian, Vol. 46, No. 1 (November 1983), 43.

[29] Charlotte E. Carr, headed Hull-House from 1937 to 1942, at the height of the settlement house’s engagement with the New Deal Popular Front and Cultural Front movements. Discussion of these developments follows.

[30] Addams was so concerned about the fate of young girls, fourteen years and older, that in 1912 the Hull-House Trade School for Girls was opened and used the area of the industrial shops and other classrooms. Dressmaking was emphasized and girls were placed in dress-making shops after completing a summer course. By 1915 a new department, The Hull-House Design Shop, prepared girls to work in children’s clothes shops. Anne S. Davis, “The Hull-House Trade School for Girls,” The Educational Bi-monthly, 207-208.

[31] Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909), 107.

[32] Washburne, 571.

[33] Washburne, 571. Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

[34] The 1893 Columbian Exposition, the Tenement House Exhibit of 1900 (New York City), the Chicago Child Welfare Exhibit in 1911, just to name a few. Addams was one of the jurors at the Paris Exposition of 1900 where she attended the lectures given by evolutionary sociologist Patrick Geddes, accredited with pioneering urban planning and took great interest in his exhibit. She had met him before and he had visited Hull-House during a lecture tour of the U.S. Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Paris, France, June 14, 1900, Swarthmore College Peace Collection Jane Addams Papers Series 1, JAP reel 3-1585-1588; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, Paris, France, June 27, 1900, Swarthmore College Peace Collection Jane Addams Papers series 1, JAP reel 3-1597-1601; Geddes work was known to Addams. I’m not sure when they met for the first time.

July 1, 2020October 23, 2025

Jane Addams, Vachel Lindsay, and Me

History is, essentially, the stories of individual people and the interconnectedness of their stories to each other and to the broader history of their communities, their societies, and their world. The intersections of the lives of the historical figures who occupy my historical imagination are fascinating to me, and the people who inspired them are always central to the development of my understanding about their lives and the historical space they occupied. Jane Addams, for example, was an inspiration to an entire generation of female reformers who lived and worked at Hull-House, and the individual work those women pursued made an important impact on Addams’s world view, her writing, and her advocacy for social and economic justice. As well, her fascination with Tolstoy and her childhood memories of Abraham Lincoln offer us insights into the development of her ideas, her ideals, and her visions for reform.

As a historian, I spend a great deal of time thinking about these human connections of the past. The close relationships of the historical figures I study—like the intimate friendship between Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith or the professional relationship Addams shared with reformer and settlement worker Lillian Wald—offer obvious clues about Addams’s personal and professional life. The intersection of these particular personal stories tell me much about the lives of women in the first part of the 20th century, the network of Progressive Era reformers, and the conditions of life in the urban environments of Chicago and New York City. But as an enthusiast of the past, it really gets interesting for me when I chance upon an unexpected or less obvious historical connection. It is particularly thrilling when that connection also resonates in some way with my own personal story or relates to other historical interests I entertain.

Recently, I was doing some editorial work on a set of documents dated just days after American entry into WWI. One document was a letter to Jane Addams, dated April 9, 1917:

My Dear Friend:

What shall I do? This war breaks my heart. Send me what you have written since [William Jennings] Bryan enlisted — for instance. Are you with Bryan? Do you accept President Wilson’s war message on its face value? Is that final with you?

I hate a hyphenated American. I hate war. But I owe no one in Europe a grudge. I would rather be shot than shoot anybody. If I had been in Congress I would have voted with Miss [Jeannette] Rankin and would have considered it a sufficient reason to say “I will not vote for war till she does.”

Please write me a tract, or send a clipping. With all respect

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay was a poet and performing artist who is relatively unknown today. He lived and worked in Springfield, Illinois, where I lived and worked myself for more than twenty years; and, therefore, I am well acquainted with his body of work and the story of his life. When I read his letter to Addams, I recalled that Lindsay had written a poem about her, inspired by her peace trip to Europe in 1915. However, I was unaware he knew Addams personally nor that he had corresponded with her. The Jane Addams Digital Edition includes four letters from Lindsay to Addams, each revealing something of the poet’s respect for and fascination with Addams and with Hull-House. In an October 1916 letter, Lindsay proclaimed: “I have loved you a long time dear lady.”

That love had, indeed, inspired the poem I had remembered, “To Jane Addams at The Hague,” which Lindsay first published in the Chicago Herald in May 1915 and later as part of his popular 1917 collection The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems.

Yellow and blue ornate book cover with Asian-inspired designs, including a dragon and decorative border. Title reads: The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems by Vachel Lindsay.

A book spread showing two poems titled To Jane Addams at the Hague by Sara Teasdale. Page 22 contains I. Speak Now for Peace and part of II. Tolstoi Ploughing, with page 23 continuing the latter poem.

In the 1910s, Lindsay spent time in Chicago performing his poems and seeing his literary friends, including the poet and magazine editor Harriet Monroe, with whom Addams was also acquainted. Lindsay frequented Hull-House, where his good friend George Hooker was a resident, and it seems likely he enjoyed at least one or two good talks with Addams. It is unclear when he might have been formally introduced to her, but in April 1916 he wrote her a letter indicating they had been corresponding for some time. That letter was a reply to a letter from Addams, and in it Lindsay sent her his wish that they may soon see a moving picture show together. There are no known extant letters of Jane Addams to Vachel Lindsay, but the content of his letters to her indicates she had some interest in the young man and his work, and in a speech in 1922, she quoted Lindsay’s analysis of the new medium of the movies in modern society.

Lindsay, who was associated with a group of celebrated Chicago writers that included Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg, was a creative and somewhat eccentric young man. He traveled the country on foot, selling his poems to support himself, and he popularized for a time the chanting and singing of poems, often performing them with musical and dance accompaniments. In December 1916, Lindsay invited Addams to one of those performances at the Little Theatre in Chicago. It is unclear if she attended, but there is evidence she invited Lindsay to Hull-House on a few occasions. In October of that year, Addams sent Lindsay a copy of her book The Long Road of Woman’s Memory, and in his letter of thanks he wrote: “I sat down and read it all morning and half the afternoon the minute it arrived. It is a lovely book—the work of a Greek, a woman more Greek than Christian.”

The fact that Lindsay, who was a progressive thinker, admired Jane Addams and her work is not surprising. Addams and Hull-House inspired many artists and writers, as well as reformers and social workers. Nor is it surprising that Lindsay, who spent time in Chicago and who interacted with people in the orbit of Hull-House, had a personal acquaintance with the famed settlement worker. What is surprising, and fascinating, too, is that Lindsay experienced a strong emotional connection to Addams. His friendship with her touched his soul, as one biographer put it. Lindsay looked to Addams for answers about his anxieties related to the war, sought her approval of his work, and shared with her his fears about failure. “Back of it all is the hope that my book shall be a live thing—a piece of ink-dynamite, not just a book pleasantly discussed by people who read my verses,” he wrote Addams in 1916. “With so many books dying before my eyes—I cannot bear to write a dead one.”

Lindsay had experienced his first hallucinations in 1904, initial signs of the future mental illness that would ultimately cost him his life; and his breakup with the poet Sara Teasdale in 1914 had been emotionally traumatic for the poet. But by 1916, Lindsay was enjoying considerable literary success, winning awards and selling books. Although four letters is far, far, far from enough evidence to evaluate the emotional importance Lindsay may have been attaching to his friendship with Addams, a close reading of the letters, however, evokes a whisper of the mental distress that was coming. There is a breathless quality to the words and the sentences, and the letters leave me wondering what kind of advice or encouragement Jane Addams may have offered Lindsay in their face-to-face interactions with each other. It is unlikely we will ever know.

What I know for certain, however, is that the relationship between Lindsay and Addams, despite what it may have meant to her on a personal level, is an example of the richness of the interconnectedness of human stories, the broader sphere of one person’s influence in the world. In this case, it speaks to the significance of Jane Addams as an inspirational figure. But it is also one of those delightful connections I am happy to chance upon, which light a spark in my historical imagination and connect my own story to the stories of the past.

Notes: Anna Massa, Vachel Lindsay: Fieldworker for the American Dream, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970, 17, 46, 100-101, 202; Eleanor Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: A Life O Vachel Lindsay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 240, 247, 258; “Lindsay, Vachel (1879-1931), American National Biography; Vachel Lindsay to Jane Addams, October 15, 1916; Vachel Lindsay to Jane Addams, October 29, 1916; Vachel Lindsay to Jane Addams, April 9, 1917; Vachel Lindsay to Jane Addams, June 26, 1917, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition. William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) was a Democratic politician from Nebraska. In April 1917, he offered his services to the government in the war effort. American National Biography. Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973), a peace activist and Republican politician from Montana, was the first woman to serve in Congress. She voted against the American declaration of war against Germany in 1917. American National Biography; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. The image of Lindsay is courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

April 1, 2020September 29, 2025

The Politician and the Old Women of Hull House

Black and white portrait of an older man with short hair, a mustache, and wearing a suit with a bow tie. The image appears vintage and slightly grainy.

Once upon a time in Chicago, there was an ambitious little politician who decided to make a name for himself by picking a fight with the women of Hull-House. For a man who built things for a living, perhaps he should have known better than to employ a political strategy of burning down the house. But he was new to politics, and he did not know better. He saw his path to power in the persona of “Battling Peter,” who would rattle the foundations of the city’s social reform structures to raise his voice above the progressive din. His political strategy was to attack social reformers in the city, particularly the female ones, and the institutions they supported.

Peter Bartzen, a 61-year-old proprietor of a mason and carpentry business, was that politician. The office he sought was President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. During the fall of 1910, the fiery Democrat campaigned for that office by denouncing what he called the “hypocritical horde of reformers,” particularly the women of Hull-House. Politically ambitious with his eyes on a future gubernatorial run, Bartzen was a political novice. His only political experience was a four-year stint as an appointed building commissioner. To be governor, he needed a political victory and a message to launch his political career. With an “aggressive personality,” Bartzen decided to make a name for himself by whipping up foment against his city’s “child savers” and meddling do-gooders.

Bartzen was not a popular candidate, but the incumbent he hoped to unseat was not all that popular, either. Bartzen, who was not widely known, won the election on the coattails of a historic Democratic sweep, the county Democrats upsetting Republicans who had held power for sixteen years. The women Bartzen had maligned during his campaign for office had no direct say in the election, because women in Chicago, in Illinois, and in most states across the country, could not vote. No doubt that is precisely why Bartzen was so comfortable in his attacks against them. But when Bartzen took his seat, many prominent women reformers in Chicago set their watchful eyes upon the pesky, provocative politician.

During his first year in office, Bartzen did much to earn the disdain of Chicago reformers. For instance, he took aim at many of the county’s social service institutions, arguing that they were doing more harm than good to the county’s children and their families. In particular, he launched a full-scale investigation of the Chicago Juvenile Court in July 1911 in an effort to dismantle it. At the same time, Bartzen wholeheartedly embraced the long Chicago tradition of the spoils system by appointing his political allies to various posts under his authority, including some within the court itself. When Bartzen removed the juvenile court’s chief probation officer John Witter, a professional hired through the civil service system, he renewed his personal attacks against Hull-House, as well. In a public statement about Witter’s firing, Bartzen said: “It looks as if Mr. Witter has been under the influence of Hull-House. He ought not to be listening to a bunch of old women all the time.”

Three women in early 20th-century clothing and hats stand together in front of a stone staircase, posing for a photograph. One woman holds gloves, another has a floral hat, and the third carries a small bag. — The “Old” Women of Hull-House (Julia Lathrop and Jane Addams with friend Mary Wilmarth, who was, actually, kind of old, but she didn’t live at Hull-House)

That bunch of old women was led by the 51-year-old Jane Addams, a nationally respected and beloved social reformer, and the 53-year-old Julia Lathrop, who helped found the influential Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and was one of the city’s most prominent proponents of the Chicago Juvenile Court. Both of the women were a decade younger than Bartzen, but he dismissed them as members of the weaker sex, with no right to their opinions let alone their influence. Bartzen’s position was a powerful one. He presided over a fifteen-member board that controlled some $10 million and managed much of the county’s infrastructure and its public institutions, including its civil service system. But the city’s community of social reformers was also powerful, and Bartzen underestimated the women who led them.

In September 1911, Bartzen’s fight with the women of Hull-House escalated. When he made a particular play to discredit the work of the Chicago Juvenile Court and the Illinois Industrial School for Girls, Julia Lathrop fired back. In a public speech, Lathrop responded: “Both attacks have been made for the purposes of political capital…The noble minded women who have been working for the salvation of Chicago’s children made some errors. They were not serious errors, but they were enough to give politicians a peg on which to hang an investigation.” The court had suffered some growing pains, but the court’s founders and supporters were willing to recognize problems and work to correct them. As well, the Chicago Woman’s Club and the Juvenile Protective Association, which included some very well-heeled and outspoken women, loudly reaffirmed their support of the institution in the wake of what they believed were unwarranted, politically motivated attacks against it.

Reformers in Chicago were eager to defend the court and its mission to help disadvantaged youth escape the harsh justice of the criminal courts. They were growing particularly concerned about Bartzen replacing qualified probation officers working with the juvenile court with political hacks. Just days after Lathrop’s defensive stand against Bartzen, Dr. James A. Britton, the chief medical officer of the city’s juvenile home, resigned his post in protest. He charged that Bartzen was thumbing his nose at civil service law, which provided qualified professional probation officers to the juvenile court, and that Bartzen was “loading up the county service with political friends.” Britton was a Hull-House resident and the husband of Gertrude Howe Britton, another Hull-House resident, who was also affiliated with the Juvenile Protective Association. Mrs. Britton was just 43-years-old, but Bartzen no doubt dismissed her, and likely her husband, too, as meddling Hull-House do-gooders. Bartzan was leaving in his political wake a long list of scorned old women at Hull-House.

During the next year, Bartzen did not change his colors, and neither did the old women of Hull-House. Bartzen continued to undermine the civil service system and threaten the life of the city’s social institutions; and the city’s reformers grew increasingly certain Bartzen was a dangerous political incumbent. In the fall of 1912, Jane Addams decided to beat Bartzen at his own game: politics. She led a group of the city’s reform-minded citizens, most of them men with political clout, to select a candidate to defeat Bartzen in the November 1912 election. The committee chose Alexander A. McCormick, a former newspaper editor and progressive thinker. In August, Addams sent a telegram home to Chicago while she was vacationing in Maine, indicating the reformers’ choice: “Social workers have much to do in persuading A A McCormick to run for president of county board.” Addams believed a failure to defeat Bartzen would spell the “destruction of juvenile court.”

Three women, dressed in early 20th-century clothing and hats, stand in an open car during a suffrage parade. A banner reading “Votes for Women” is draped on the side of the car. Crowds are visible in the background. — Jane Addams (at right) in a parade for woman suffrage.

McCormick agreed to run on a Progressive Party ticket, and Addams’s political committee went to work. The campaign against Bartzen was ruthless, focused as it was on exposing him as a danger to the county’s most vulnerable citizens. Women led the charge, giving speeches and writing letters. On Nov. 2, 1912, on the Saturday just before the election, Addams and her committee behind McCormick published in the Chicago newspapers a signed circular entitled “Call to Public Service in the Interest of the Poor, Sick, Aged and Injured, and the Helpless Children of Chicago and Cook County.” The document skewered Bartzen’s policies, accused him of wasting public funds, asserted his guilt in “crimes of neglect and mismanagement of the Cook County Hospital,” and called his attack on the juvenile court “misleading and fraudulent.” In summary, the circular cautioned readers: “A vote for Peter Bartzen means a vote for the continued demoralization of all the public service institutions of the county, on which Bartzen and his henchmen have feasted while the dependents of the county have starved and been neglected.”

It is true that 1912 was a weird political year, with the role of a spunky third party mixing things up at the local, state, and national levels. The “Bull Moose” factor definitely influenced the Cook County elections. However, Bartzen’s particular reelection chances appeared to have lost traction on the heels of Chicago’s old women weighing in so loudly on his political record. Bartzen’s political strategy of picking a fight with Hull-House and Chicago’s most respected citizen backfired, and he lost the election.

The ambitious little politician had underestimated the old women at Hull-House and the political power they could garner, even without the right to vote for themselves. Bartzen not only lost this election, but he did not become the governor of Illinois, either. Even his obituary in 1933 dismissed his brief political career as minor, remembering his tenure as “anything but peaceful.” In the end, “Battling Peter” lost his battle against the battle-tested old women of Hull-House. While those women continued to make their positive marks on the history of Chicago, history resigned Bartzen to the political dustbin.

In 1914, Jane Addams published an article in the Ladies’ Home Journal in which she hailed the value of women over the age of fifty. “The weariness and dullness, which inhere in both domestic and social affairs when they are carried on by men alone, will no longer be a necessary attribute of public life when such gracious and gray-haired women become a part of it,” she wrote. “Ever-widening channels are gradually being provided through which woman’s increasing moral energy may flow, and it is not too much to predict that in the end public affairs will be amazingly revivified from those new fountainheads fed in the upper reaches of woman’s matured capacity.”

In the article, Addams shouted praise to “old” women like Ella Flagg Young, the Chicago Superintendent of Schools; novelist Edith Wharton; and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the long-running president of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association. Jane Addams knew the fight that resided in the hearts of experienced, capable, older women. She understood the beautiful extent of possibilities for women who used their talents for the betterment of their communities and the world. Peter Bartzen probably didn’t read that Ladies’ Home Journal article, and he may have never admitted to himself or to anyone else that he had been undone by women. Who knows if he harbored any regrets about his brief political career or the choices he made to conduct it.

The story of the politician and the old women of Hull-House is not a fairytale in which the villains are defeated and heroes in the story live happily ever after. Real life is more complicated than that. But this story is, perhaps, a fable Aesop himself may have written if he had lived in Chicago during the Progressive Era, when Jane Addams and scores of smart, capable, and commanding older women roamed the city’s dirty streets in order to clean them up. The moral of that fable is this: Beware the people you look past in your blind ambition; beware the people who seem to be precisely what you assume, unthreatening and unworthy of your respect. They might just turn out to be the clever, unrelenting, powerful force that becomes the fatal obstacle you never expected.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Notes: David S. Tanenhaus, Juvenile Justice in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 82-110; Albert Nelson Marquis, ed., Book of Chicagoans, 1911 (Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Co., 1911), 42-43; Illinois, Deaths and Stillbirths Index, 1916-1947; Witter v. County Commissioners, 256 Ill. 616 (1912); “Editorial Musings,” The Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL), Nov. 4, 1910, p. 1; Letter, Nov. 5, 1910, “Busse-Deneen Ring Is Smashed in Cook County by Democratic Victory,” Nov. 9, 1910, p. 1; “Would End Juvenile Court,” Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1911, p. 7; “Fight New Child Court Idea,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 1, 1911, p. 4; “Bartzen Scored by Julia Lathrop,” Chicago Tribune, Sep. 24, 1911, p. 5; “Physician Quits Bartzen Regime,” Chicago Tribune, Sep. 26, 1911, p. 3; “Call to Public Service,” Nov. 2, 1912, p. 5; “Sociologists Say Bartzen Is Menace,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), Nov. 2, 1912, p. 5; “Chicago Women, In Humane Plea, Flay Bartzen,” The Inter Ocean, Nov. 2, 1912, p. 1; “Save the Helpless From Bartzen,” The Inter Ocean, Nov. 4, 1912, p. 6; “Old and New County Board Presidents Shake Hands,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 1, 1912, p. 3; “Peter Bartzen, Old Political Battler, Dead,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 8, 1933, p. 1; Jane Addams to Julia Clifford Lathrop, August 7, 1911; Endorsement for Alexander McCormick for Cook County Board of Commissioners, 1912; Jane Addams to Alexander Agnew McCormick, August 21, 1912; Jane Addams to Charles E. Merriam, August 21, 1912; Jane Addams to Raymond Robins, August 21, 1912; Raymond Robins to Jane Addams, August 22, 1912; Need a Woman Over Fifty Feel Old?, October, 1914, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

December 18, 2019October 14, 2025

Women’s Hoops at Hull-House

A group of women in old-fashioned clothing play basketball in a gym with wooden floors and brick walls; one woman crouches over the ball while others gather around her.

Six women in vintage sports uniforms stand in a row indoors, posing for a team photo. A soccer ball is on the floor in front of them. Handwritten text is visible above their heads on the background. — Hull-House Women’s Basketball Team, 1907

Women played basketball at Hull-House. Well…they played basket ball, two words. In bloomers, wearing long sleeves and lace collars, and with hair coiffed into neat buns. Early on, female players of this thrilling new game also competed under the regulation of girls’ rules, which restricted their movement across the court. There were many people in those days who deemed the game unwomanly and fretted about women overexerting themselves. However, women’s basketball at Hull-House quickly got real. What would become one of America’s favorite sports made an early start in Chicago on Hull-House hardwood, and women were on the court from the start. Who knew Jane Addams, in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, helped birth the first generation of female athletes in the city?!

James Naismith invented and promoted the game of basketball in 1891, and two years later women at Smith College were playing it with modified rules to “avoid physical roughness” and to maintain at least the appearance of femininity. When Hull-House resident Rose Gyles became director of the Hull-House gymnasium in 1895, she brought the game to the men, women, and children of Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. Under her guidance, Hull-House fielded one of the first girls basketball teams in Chicago. At Hull-House, the women’s players shared the facilities right along with the three Hull-House men’s teams. By the late 1890s, Hull-House had two competitive women’s teams, a growing group of interested girls playing the sport for recreation at the settlement, and a winning record in Chicago’s burgeoning basketball league. A generation of “new” women were growing up at Hull-House, and competitive sport played a role in their changing relationships with the world around them. For many Hull-House girls, like reformer Florence Kelley’s daughter Margaret (who was partly raised at the settlement), basketball was a part of their coming-out party.

Black and white photo of young girls in old-fashioned gym uniforms standing in a row indoors, each holding onto gymnastic swing ropes suspended from the ceiling. Large windows and brick walls are visible in the background. — Image 2: Female Physical Education at Hull-House

Women of the upper classes long had access to organized sports, like tennis, croquet, and archery. However, in the context of a growing belief in the benefits of fresh air, physical fitness, and physical education programs, interest in sports for the masses increased, and basketball became a popular activity. Public and private schools fielded recreational and competitive teams, churches and private organizations like the YMCA offered athletic facilities, city parks built playgrounds and athletic fields, and even settlement houses jumped on the sports bandwagon. Hull-House maintained a gymnasium from the start and continually worked to improve it over the years, offering girls, boys, men, and women in the neighborhood a variety of athletic programs.

Hull-House was famous for its social settlement and reform work, but in Chicago it was also famous for basketball. And at Hull-House, the basketball program, like most all of its other programs, did not discriminate against girls and young women. Hull-House celebrated female athletics. Women’s basketball games at Hull-House were announced in the Chicago papers, encouraging attendance, and scores were published the next day.

Black and white photo of eleven women in early 1900s attire, some holding dumbbells, posing formally in two rows. Most are standing, with a few seated in front, looking toward the camera. — Image 3: Hull-House Women’s Basketball Team

In 1906, Jane Addams’s Hull-House girls beat Graham Taylor’s Chicago Commons girls 26-3 in the Hull-House Gymnasium. Over the years, Hull-House sort of owned Chicago Commons where women’s basketball was concerned, and I wonder if Addams ever teased her good friend and fellow settlement worker across town about Hull-House domination. Hull-House teams did not only compete against other settlement houses, however. They also played Chicago high schools, church teams, and other organizational teams, as well.

Jane Addams was herself a proponent of exercise and recreational activities for women. In a speech in 1908, she praised Chicago for establishing and maintaining “fifteen parks with playing fields, gymnasiums and baths, which at present enroll 18,000 young women and girls.” Addams was very supportive of the developing basketball program at Hull-House, although she did question the wisdom of the sports’ less-than-adequate venue. In 1902, when sixteen-year-old Margaret Kelley was injured during a game, Addams wrote her mother: “She hurt her head playing basket ball you know—and I am in doubt as to whether she ought to play in a gym full of posts!”

Historic black-and-white photo of a large brick building with steep gabled roofs, tall chimneys, and arched windows, situated on a street corner with a few people and a horse-drawn carriage nearby. — Image 4: Hull-House Gymnasium, c. 1900.

Jane Addams was, of course, merely joking, and basketball carried on at the settlement. Regardless that male and female athletes might get hurt, the Hull-House gymnasium remained a popular gathering place for basketball players and for spectators, alike. In the first decade of the twentieth century, basketball was a quickly growing sport. It was popular with men and children, but it was also becoming a favorite activity of college coeds. The captain of the University of Chicago women’s team said of the sport in 1896: “It calls into play every muscle in the body, and besides the real benefit we get out of the exercise it is quite the nicest game we play.” Another aficionado of the sport noted that it tended to quiet the nerves of restless young women.

Others believed women should avoid sports like basketball. Some medical professionals argued that the sport was too athletic for women and, according to one University of Chicago physician, the exertion the sport required of women led to “enlarged, irritable, and overactive hearts.” His assertion is, of course, ludicrous from the viewpoint of our modern medical perspective, but it was alarming to many people in the early 1900s. In 1907, the Illinois State High School Athletic Association barred girls from playing basketball, arguing:

“The game is altogether too masculine and has met with much opposition on the part of parents. The committee finds that roughness is not foreign to the game, and that the exercise in public is immodest and not altogether ladylike.”

Fortunately for the female basketball players in Chicago, the ruling did not affect them, as Chicago schools were not members of the state association. Thus, women’s basketball continued on in the city, and women played it with increasing gusto. Early women’s basketball in Chicago had followed Smith College rules, which positioned seven players in designated areas of the court to limit physical exertion. However, in 1903, the Chicago girls basketball league adopted boy’s rules instead, and thereafter five players for each team took the court for each girls basketball game, and the physicality of the play increased. In 1909, the Chicago Tribune reported on a particularly athletic came between the Evanston Girls Athletic Club and the Evanston YMCA team:

“Frizzles, pompadours, marcel waves, psyche knots, corkscrew curls, and Aunt Mary’s wavelets were all mauled in a strenuous context last night…Bangs, rats, and other feminine fixings became segregated from their original compositions and several times it was necessary to stop the carnage to make repairs. The athletic girls won, 9 to 8, but this was merely one of the hair raising incidents.”

In spite of the possible physical dangers of athletics and in the face of public, medical, and media scorn for women who engaged in sports, more and more girls and young women wanted to play games and to be physically active. There may have been a decline in public enthusiasm for the sport as an acceptable pursuit for women, but basketball was still popular with young women, particularly on college campuses. College women were not only playing the sport for healthy recreation, either. They were also gaining a competitive spirit and making demands for proper equipment and equity with men’s teams. In 1902, for example, Northwestern University women basketball players demanded the college provide them with uniforms and allow them to travel outside of Evanston, IL, for games. The woman ultimately won their fight to travel, and the team played in their first away game in Pontiac, IL, the following year.

By 1916, 900 young people were enrolled in programs in the Hull-House gymnasium, many of them girls and women, and many of them playing on sixteen organized basketball teams. Title IX—sweeping federal legislation that sought to equalize women’s access to educational opportunities of all sorts, including sports—was still decades away. In the first half of the twentieth century, there remained, as well, widespread concern that organized sports defeminized women. Society also placed a stigma upon women who dared to step outside of gendered norms which sought to constrain them. However, women and girls played on, at Hull-House, in Chicago, and across the country.

Women who had the opportunity to engage in physical activities like basketball in the Hull-House gymnasium took those experiences out into the world with them. Playing the sport gave them confidence in their bodies and developed in their spirits courage and grit and gumption. Emma Karstens, a Hull-House basketball player and coach went on to direct other athletic programs in the city, inspiring girls and young women to be physically active and to play sports. In 1920, she was involved with a city-wide sports fest, which encouraged girls and boys to take part in athletics. In less direct ways, girls who played basketball and other games at Hull-House were also shaped by those experiences. The settlement’s early encourage of girls to engage in sports and other activities previously thought to be the domain of men inspired thousands of women and girls to be more, do more, and raise daughters differently than they themselves were raised. Hull-House was on a grand scale a locus of serious social, economic, and political reforms; but Hull-House was also a place where girls could stretch the boundaries of their own imaginations.

Hoops at Hull-House could arguably be credited with establishing the popularity of basketball in the city of Chicago. We might also accurately call Jane Addams one of the mothers of the first generation of female athletes. But one thing is certain. Hull-House offered girls and women opportunities about which they may have never dared to dream. On the hardwood or elsewhere on the settlement campus, girls and women mattered. Girls and women were considered capable. And, most importantly perhaps, Hull-House set the bar high for girls and women and expected them not only clear the bar, but to set it even higher for themselves.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

Sad Epilogue: Margaret Kelley was definitely a young woman who grew through her experiences at Hull-House. She was a courageous and energetic young woman when she arrived at Smith College in 1905, determined to take advantage of college athletics even though she had been “cautioned against violent exercise.” Unfortunately, Margaret’s ailing heart failed her, and she suffered a fatal heart attack that year.

Notes: Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis, eds., 100 Years at Hull-House (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 73-74 (Image 3); Peggy Glowacki and Julia Hendry, Hull House (Chicago: Arcadia, 2004), 26 (Image 2); Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 306; “The New Athletic Girl and Interscholastic Sports,” in Robert Purter, The Rise of American High School Sports and the Search for Control (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 145-53; “Before the Sports Bra: A Short History of Women’s Sports through the 1970s,” in Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 119-22; Joan S. Hult, “Introduction to Part I,” 6-7; Betty Spears, “Senda Berenson Abbott: New Woman, New Sport,” 24-25; “Clara Gregory Baer: Catalyst for Women’s Basketball,” 45; Lynne Fauley Emery and Margaret Toohey-Costa, “Hoops and Skirts: Women’s Basketball on the West Coast, 1892-1930,” 50, all in Joan S. Hult and Marianna Trekell, eds. A Century of Women’s Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four (Reston, VA: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 1991); Kathryn Kish Sklar and Beverly Wilson Palmer, eds., The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869-1931 (Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 2009), 134n1; Emma Karstens in 1910 U.S. Federal Census; Hull-House Basketball Players, 1907 and Hull-House Basketball Players, 1909, photographs, Chicago History Museum, Explore Chicago Collections (Images 5 & 6); “Many Athletic Coeds,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 30, 1896, p. 8; “Talks of New Woman,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), Dec. 29, 1900, p. 12; “’Coed’ Team Wants Uniforms,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 11, 1902, p. 13; “Girls Adopt Boys’ Rules,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 11, 1903, p. 10; “Girls to Play Basketball,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 10, 1903, p. 6; “Athletics at Northwestern,” The Inter-Ocean, Apr. 15, 1903, p. 4; “Drops Dead in Gymnasium,” The Bedford (IN) Daily Mail, Oct. 23, 1905, p. 2; “Hull House Girls Win,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 4, 1906, p. 11; “Hull House Girls, 25; Gads Hill, 13,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 10, 1906, p. 10; “Armour Mission Girls Win,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 18, 1907, p. 12; “Bars Girls from Basketball,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 3, 1907, p. 25; “Great Wreckage of ‘Fixings,’” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 28, 1909, p. 31; “Women’s Gymnasium,” Suburban Economist (Chicago), May 2, 1919, p. 3; “Chicago Pauses for Day’s Romp with 5,000 Kids,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 10, 1920, p. 11; Selected Papers of Jane Addams,(Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 2019), 3:xxxii (Image 4), 345n6, 346 (Image 1); Hull-House Bulletin 1 (No. 4, April 1896), 5, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm, reel 53:897; Jane Addams to Florence Kelley, December 29, 1902; Hull-House Year Book 1906-1907; Address to the Playground Association, March 31, 1908; Hull-House Year Book, January 1, 1916, all in Jane Addams Digital Edition.

October 18, 2019September 29, 2025

From Lincoln Rubber Ducky to Addams Signed Note

A handwritten note reads: Faithfully yours, Jane Addams / Dec-Home, Chicago.

For the twenty years I edited Abraham Lincoln’s papers, I never had a strong desire to own a Lincoln document. Well, let’s be honest, I never made enough money to buy a Lincoln document. Even a clipped Lincoln signature will set you back a few grand. Instead, my Lincoln collection included a bookcase full of Lincoln mass-market biographies and edited volumes, a nice bust, one significant historic print, a few mugs, salt and pepper shakers, and a weird-but-adorable Lincoln rubber ducky.

My Lincoln collecting was not at all sophisticated, based as it was on a scholarly editor’s pocketbook, but it was great fun and it still gives me much joy. Looking back on my collection now, I understand the value of my kitschy Lincoln stuff for the giggle it inspired in me as I conducted my serious scholarly work and for the little breather it provided from the rarified air of academic history. History should be fun, darn it, and part of the reason I think so many Americans find history boring is because they had teachers who squeezed no fun out of history at all.

I am a historian who squeezes a great deal of fun from the work I am lucky to do. I am also a historian who embraces my historical subjects with a big hug, leaning in and opening my heart as well as my head to my work. I am passionate about finding the humanity of the historical figures I study. I think at least in part, the fun I had collecting Lincolniana humanized Lincoln for me and humanized the scholar in me, too. It allowed me to see Lincoln as a man (and a bobblehead), not as a god or a myth, and to allow my work to delight me. My editing work made an important contribution to Lincoln scholarship, but allowing humor and humanity into the work provided me with balance. My joyful approach to Lincoln rooted my feet to the ground, where history actually lives, and kept my head out of the ivory tower, where history is sometimes self-important and inaccessible.

When I started working for the Jane Addams Papers Project in January 2017, I naturally approached Jane Addams in the same way I had approached Lincoln. Joy and a sense of fun balanced my very serious effort to get to know the woman and the social reformer Addams was, to understand her era, and to learn all I could about the fascinating historical contexts of her life. In the beginning of my work with the project, I immersed myself in biographies about Addams, and I studied her surviving correspondence, the speeches she delivered, and the articles and books she published. However, I also immediately coveted the Jane Addams doll that was sitting on a shelf in the project’s offices in New Jersey. All work and no fun is just not my style.

It took a few weeks, but I found said doll on eBay for $10, and Jane the Doll has been sitting next to or on my desk ever since. In her smart gray frock and sensible black hat she stands, with a slight muppet-like smile, holding her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House under her arm and wearing her Nobel Peace Prize medal around her neck. To me, Jane the Doll is a muse, of sorts, juxtaposed as it is to the ever more solemn nature of the life-changing reform work in which the real Jane Addams was engaged. I also like that the doll is the silly to Jane Addams’s serious. It is, as well, a daily physical reminder that while my work may be a scholarly business, it is also an honor and a pleasure. I actually get paid to do work I love, so why not embrace the passion and the fun within it.

As I did with Lincoln for twenty years, I now do with Jane Addams. I balance the serious with the silly. I admit it is sometimes harder to find the funny bone in Miss Addams than it was to find it in Mr. Lincoln, but that is no bar to my finding levity in the painstaking and labor-intensive scholarly editing work I do. Collecting my subjects is my way of bringing fun into my life as a historian, so it was exciting for me to learn it will be well within my financial reach to collect first editions of each of Jane Addams’s published books (five already down six to go!). Although memorabilia of Addams is far more rare than it is for Lincoln, in my growing collection of Addams kitsch, I have already added a peace poster for the wall, buttons with “I Love Jane Addams” and “I love Peace,” a coffee mug, and a “Peace, Love, and Jane Addams” t-shirt. Only recently, however, did I realize that a Jane Addams document could be available to me for purchase.

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Springfield, Illinois, for a Lincoln event and to meet up with a group of people who have come into my life through our shared interest in Abraham Lincoln. One of those people who joined me in the sunny beer garden across from the Lincoln Home that afternoon brought me a surprise from the rare bookshop where he works: a printed calling card signed by Jane Addams! It is not a historically important note or a romantic letter to Jane’s beloved Mary Rozet Smith. It is not large, measuring just a 3½ by 2¼ inches. It is not in perfect condition, either. In fact, it has some damage on the printed side from glue which held it in position in an album or adhered it to matting within a frame, and one blob of gluey residue obscures the printed script of “Hull-House.” However, the handwritten side is pristine and features legible-for-Jane-Addams scrawl and her characteristic loopy signature. It is a humble document, indeed, but its imperfections do not lessen my enchantment with it.

Holding that little note in my hands for the first time tendered a tangible spark through my fingers and up to my heart, sending me back in time 100 years. To noisy, dirty, Progressive-Era Chicago. To Hull-House in the city’s impoverished and overcrowded 19^th Ward. To Jane Addams, “the world’s best-known and best-loved woman” of her time, standing in the doorway. Handling a historic document has always been for me a kind of handshake with the historical figure of the past who wrote it. Over the years of searching for Lincoln documents in repositories across the country, I shook hands with Lincoln a great many times. But because I work with digital copies of documents at the Addams Papers, this was the first time I had the pleasure of this special and particular introduction to Addams. My day trip to Springfield got even better when I carried that little scrap of Jane Addams handwriting home for fifty times less than it would have cost me had Abraham Lincoln been the one who had penned it.

It annoys me to know that the manuscript market is as sexist as the world. To deem as practically worthless a handwritten note with a fine signature, written by a woman who was the most significant reformer of the Progressive Era, is, I think, almost a crime. But the market’s misjudgment and loss is my gain, allowing me to own a piece of historical magic. My little Jane Addams note is priceless to me. It is the star of my collection of Addamsiana, and I plan to have it conserved and encased in a two-sided archival frame. I do not have aspirations to collect additional documents in the hand of Jane Addams. This one will be enough for me (at least for now, I think). It conjures the handshake, inspires my joy, and provides a palpable human connection to a woman I get to hang out with five days a week.

Anyway, from the perspective of historical memorabilia, in going from a $1 Lincoln rubber ducky to a signed Addams note worth about 100 bucks, I’ve come a long way, baby. Maybe not the equivalent of Jane Addams getting the right to vote, but still super cool for this historian, who is having way too much fun.

By Stacy Lynn, Associate Editor

A cream-colored card with elegant cursive text reading Miss Addams. Four prominent brownish stains are scattered across the card.

September 23, 2019September 29, 2025

Guest Post: Striving for Social Justice: Jane Addams and Sophonisba Breckinridge

Sepia-toned portrait of a woman with light-colored, wavy hair styled back, wearing a high-collared patterned blouse, and looking slightly to the side with a neutral expression.

By Anya Jabour, Regents Professor of History, University of Montana

The subject of my new book, Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women’s Activism in Modern America, worked closely with Jane Addams for decades. The two women, along with other reformers affiliated with Hull House, championed labor legislation, provided services to immigrants, promoted woman suffrage, and advocated for world peace. Together, they were a powerful force for social justice.

Born and raised in Kentucky, Breckinridge came to Chicago to pursue higher education at the coeducational University of Chicago. After earning her M.A. (1897) and Ph.D. (1901) in political science, she graduated with her J.D. (1904) at the top of the Law School’s first graduating class. After completing her coursework, Breckinridge taught a pioneering course on “The Legal and Economic Position of Women” that brought her into contact with the Second City’s labor organizers and social reformers.

Breckinridge’s concern about the plight of working women initiated her long association with Hull House and its head resident, Jane Addams. In 1905, at Addams’s suggestion, she accepted an appointment as Inspector of Yards, investigating the working conditions of women in Chicago’s infamous stockyard district. Breckinridge spent more than four months inspecting the facilities and interviewing the employees of “Packingtown,” mostly immigrant girls and young women between the ages of 16 and 22. Working in cold, windowless rooms and standing on “dirty, blood-soaked, rotting wooden floors” for ten hours a day, the workers “toil[ed] without relief in a humid atmosphere heavy with the odors of rotten wood, decayed meats, stinking offal,” and human waste from the doorless privies that vented directly into the workrooms. Breckinridge found her task exhausting, both physically and emotionally. To Addams, she confessed, “I was getting where I could not sleep—the vision of the day’s work presses in so! Not my own day’s work—but that of the crews of girls I see marching past me now.”

Breckinridge translated her emotional response to women workers’ abysmal working conditions into social scientific scholarship and policy recommendations. In addition to publishing her study on women workers in the stockyards, she reported her findings to the U.S. Labor Department. With the support of settlement house workers, clubwomen, and trade unionists, she helped persuade the department to provide funding for a full-scale investigation. Ultimately, the nineteen-volume report on the working conditions of wage-earning women and children, published between 1910 and 1913, provided the basis for the establishment of two new federal bureaus, the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the U.S. Women’s Bureau. These government agencies would advocate for a ban on child labor and better working conditions for women for decades to come.

Two women in long dresses stand on an ivy-covered building’s porch, surrounded by plants. In the background, a large church or university tower is visible across a lawn. The photo is black and white. — Breckinridge (right) with Julia Clifford Lathrop (left) University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-02244], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Breckinridge’s work with Addams on behalf of working women soon led to an invitation to live and work at Hull House. As Russell Ballard, one of the few male residents of Hull House, expressed it, “a brilliant company of women were drawn to the settlement to pioneer in the promotion of social change. The scholarly and talented Sophonisba Breckinridge joined the company in 1907 to become one of Miss Addams’ closest friends and most helpful associates.” Although her responsibilities at the University of Chicago prevented her from living at Hull House full-time, Breckinridge spent all of her vacation quarters—and much of her limited free time—at Hull-House, where she was listed as an official “resident” from 1907 until 1921.

Breckinridge became one of Addams’s closest colleagues. She helped to raise funds for the settlement, served as a substitute speaker when Addams was unavailable, and assisted Addams with her correspondence. Breckinridge’s papers are filled with hastily scrawled notes from Addams, invariably beginning with the exclamatory greeting “Dear Lady!” and closing, “Hastily yours, Jane Addams.” In response to such letters, Breckinridge assisted Addams in innumerable ways, both large and small, leading Addams to close one typical letter asking Breckinridge to perform a task, “I do hope that I am not putting too many things ‘off’ on you.” Breckinridge always came through for Addams, signing one letter, “Yours to command always.”

Soon after Breckinridge took up residence at Hull House, she joined a special committee investigating the conditions confronting young single immigrant women who arrived in the city, lost and alone and vulnerable to both sexual and economic exploitation. A typical case was that of Bozena, “a nice young Bohemian immigrant girl” who was “so eager for work . . . that she had taken the first job she could find—in a saloon.” As fellow Hull House resident Edith Abbott, Breckinridge’s colleague at the University of Chicago, explained: “The saloonkeeper had abused her shamefully and then turned her out when he found that she was to become the mother of his illegitimate child.”

Hull House residents helped Bozena file charges, obtain childcare, learn English, gain citizenship, and find work. But Breckinridge and Addams soon realized that the problem of “lost immigrant girls”—as well as the difficulties confronting immigrant men and children—was too widespread for existing service agencies to address. As Addams explained the problem:

Every year we have heard of girls who did not arrive when their families expected them, and although their parents frantically met one train after another, the ultimate fate of the girls could never be discovered; we have constantly seen the exploitation of the newly arrived immigrant by his shrewd countrymen in league with the unscrupulous American; from time to time we have known children detained in New York and even deported whose parents had no clear understanding of the difficulty.

With Addams’s enthusiastic support, Breckinridge proposed the creation of a new organization, and the Immigrants’ Protective League was established in 1908. As Abbott recalled: “This problem of the unaccompanied girls proved to be challenging; but nothing that ought to be done seemed impossible to Miss Breckinridge!”

A woman in academic regalia stands on stone steps in front of a large wooden door, with ivy-covered walls in the background. She wears a long robe with dark stripes on the sleeves and a cap. — Breckinridge at Green Hall at the University of Chicago. (Courtesy of University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-02252], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.)

The Immigrants’ Protective League provided essential assistance to Chicago’s immigrants—women, men, and children. One of the League’s first major accomplishments was establishing “a kind of immigration station” to welcome new arrivals. Immigrants who arrived in Chicago by train met with League agents—chosen to represent the nationalities and speak the languages of their clients— who helped orient newcomers to the city. Agents provided new arrivals with information about employment opportunities, social services, and evening classes. One of the principal goals of the League was to protect immigrants from exploitation. At the welcome station, agents helped new arrivals steer clear of unscrupulous cab drivers, fraudulent employment agents, and the ever-present “cadets” who recruited young women into prostitution. Breckinridge also persuaded local women’s clubs to provide funds for the League to provide temporary lodging for young immigrant women. In only four years, the League served close to 80,000 immigrants at its welcome station.

Breckinridge and Addams continued to team up to advance social reform. In 1911, they were elected vice-presidents of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Under their leadership, the Second City quickly became a “stronghold for the cause.” However, internal dissension caused both women to dread meetings of the national board, which Addams compared to being immersed in “boiling oil.”

Tensions came to a head in Fall 1912, when Breckinridge and Addams, in defiance of the suffrage organization’s traditional commitment to non-partisanship, declared their support for Progressive Party presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Addams, Breckinridge, and other activists not only convinced the third-party candidate to support woman suffrage, but also helped to shape the Progressive Party’s agenda. The third-party platform, known as the “Contract with the People,” was modeled on the “Platform of Industrial Minimums” adopted at the 1912 National Conference of Charities and Corrections, where both Breckinridge and Addams played prominent roles. The platform included demands for a “living wage,” unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation for all workers, as well as special protections for women and children in the workforce.

However, Breckinridge and Addams failed to convince NAWSA leadership that the suffrage movement should use party politics to promote either women’s rights or social welfare. Instead, president Anna Howard Shaw publicly denounced “party ties.” This uncomfortable situation led both Addams and Breckinridge to resign their posts after only a year in office.

Although they remained active in the suffrage movement, after leaving office, Breckinridge and Adams shifted their focus away from NAWSA and toward the Woman’s Peace Party, which they co-founded in 1915 in response to armed conflict in Europe—what would later become known as World War I. The Woman’s Peace Party was the first U.S. pacifist group to treat “peace as a women’s issue.” Many members believed that women had a special responsibility to protect life and thus to prevent war. The party preamble and platform called on women, as “the mother half of humanity,” to oppose the “reckless destruction” of human life resulting from warfare. At the same time that they emphasized women’s special responsibility for peace work, feminist pacifists also demanded equal political rights for women. Believing that women’s full participation in the political process was essential to ending global conflict, members of the Woman’s Peace Party worked for both women’s rights and world peace.

As chairperson and treasurer of the Woman’s Peace Party, respectively, Addams and Breckinridge represented the new organization at an international feminist-pacifist gathering known as the International Congress of Women and held at The Hague in 1915. The Congress enthusiastically adopted many of the measures proposed by the U.S. representatives, calling for the creation of an international peacekeeping body, national self-determination for all countries, and equal political participation for women. Following the Congress, two delegations visited political and religious leaders of both neutral and belligerent nations. When Addams, who participated in the visits, returned home, she did so as the first president of the new International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace.

Addams, Breckinridge, and other members of the Woman’s Peace Party took the lead in attempts to find a peaceful solution to the ongoing war. After Addams returned to the United States, she and Breckinridge worked with both male and female pacifists in Chicago and New York to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to intervene in the European conflict as a neutral intermediary. Addams hand-picked Breckinridge for a special committee assigned to consult with other pacifists within and beyond the U.S. on strategies to “make propositions to the belligerenets [sic] in the spirit of constructive internationalism.”

Throughout the war, Addams, Breckinridge, and other members of the Woman’s Peace Party pressured President Wilson to intervene in the war to produce a “negotiated peace.” Wilson had made initial overtures in this direction at the war’s outset, but his offer was rebuffed. Thereafter, Wilson adopted a pose of watchful waiting. Although he steadfastly maintained his intention to offer mediation when the time seemed propitious, that time never arrived. However, Wilson’s willingness to meet with pacifist delegations, his cordial relationship with Addams, and his assurances that he considered the women’s proposals at The Hague “by far the best formulation” for world peace, encouraged the pacifist women to continue their efforts.

A black and white photo of a large group of women in early 20th-century attire, many wearing hats and coats, gathered on the steps outside a brick building for a formal group portrait. — Addams and Breckinridge co-founded the Woman’s Peace Party, later to become the U.S. chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, in 1915. (Courtesy Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library)

Addams and Breckinridge continued their search for ways to prevent U.S. entry into the conflict, to end the war, and to prevent future wars. In the aftermath of the Lusitania episode, they urged President Wilson to steer clear of what they called “a preposterous ‘preparedness’ against hypothetical dangers” and instead to provide “the epochal service which this world crisis offers for the establishment of permanent peace”—that is, to offer his services to mediate the ongoing conflict. Subsequently, they appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee of Foreign Affairs to express their support for a House Joint Resolution proposal to establish a “Commission for Enduring Peace.”

A group of women in early 20th-century clothing stands on a wooden deck, holding a large banner reading PEACE. Some wear hats with plumes, and ship structures are visible in the background. — The U.S. delegation to the International Congress of Women in 1915 on board the Noordam. Jane Addams in center behind the banner, Breckinridge is on the far right. (Courtesy Swarthmore College Peace Collection)

Despite their best efforts, American pacifists were unable either to halt the ongoing war or to prevent the United States’ entry into it. Once hostilities ceased, Breckinridge and Addams—now part of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—sought new routes to “enduring peace.” They achieved a partial victory in the establishment of the League of Nations, which incorporated many of the principles adopted at the International Congress of Women. Although the U.S. failed to join the new organization, Addams and Breckinridge persisted in promoting their vision of a peaceful postwar world. In 1923, they discussed submitting “our” set of principles for the American Peace Award. The plan that Breckinridge and Addams proposed called for the United States to join the World Court and the League of Nations. They also demanded that the U.S. military refrain from defending the interests of private businesses abroad, that the U.S. end both the production and the sale of armaments, and that the U.S. cooperate with other nations in a process of universal disarmament. Finally, they recommended “cancelling or reducing debts due to the United States” from the other Allied countries in return for an agreement to “divide the costs of commissions hitherto charged against Germany alone equally between Germany and the former allies” and offering “a long moratorium to Germany” to allow that nation “eventually to pay the balance on her reparations debt as estimated by an impartial commission of experts to be constituted for the purpose.” Addams’s and Breckinridge’s joint plan thus called for the United States to promote peace not only by agreeing to abide by arbitration in future disputes and participating in a process of universal disarmament, but also by removing the reasons for rising resentment in Germany that would soon allow Adolf Hitler to rise to power. Sadly, their plan was never implemented. Nonetheless, in the years after the Second World War, many of their ideas would be adopted by the United Nations.

Addams and Breckinridge were not always fully successful in their efforts to promote social justice, but they shared a passion for justice that allowed them to persist in the face of difficulties and setbacks. Their collaboration with one another and with fellow reformers also enabled them to meet challenges with strong resolve and good cheer. Together, Addams and Breckinridge were a powerful force for social justice.

Coda: Because Breckinridge’s own papers, while extensive, are comparatively scant for the Progressive Era, to conduct my research on these decades of her life, I relied heavily on the 82-reel microfilmed edition of the Jane Addams Papers and the accompanying “Pink Bible,” the 674-page guide to the microfilm collection, created with the guidance of Jane Addams Papers Project founder Mary Lynn Bryan. I am delighted that future researchers’ work will be facilitated by the next generation of the Jane Addams Paper Project, spearheaded by Cathy Moran Hajo, which will make the Jane Addams Papers accessible in a digital format.

Anya Jabour is Regents Professor of History at the University of Montana. Her books include Topsy-Turvy: How the Civil War Turned the World Upside Down for Southern Children and Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South

Sources:

Abbott, Edith, and Breckinridge, Sophonisba P. “Women in Industry: The Chicago Stockyards,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 19, No. 8 (October 1911), 632-654.

Addams, Jane. “Woman’s Suffrage and the Progressive Party,” Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1912, pg. 9.

Addams, Jane, Balch, Emily G., and Hamilton, Alice. Women at the Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results (New York: Macmillan Company, 1915).

Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993).

Ballard, Russell. “The Years at Hull House,” Social Service Review, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec. 1948), 432-433.

Brush, Mary Isabel. “Society Leaders Will Promote Suffrage Cause in Chicago’s Fashionable Circles: National Association to Open Branch,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 24, 1911, pg. 13.

Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, et al., eds., The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)

Buroker, Robert L. “From Voluntary Association to Welfare State: The Illinois Immigrants’ Protective League, 1908-1926,” Journal of American History, Vol. 58, No. 3 (December 1971), 643-660.

“Charity Honors for Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1912, pg. 13.

Commission for Enduring Peace: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Sixty-Fourth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 6921 and H.J. Res. 32, Statement of Miss Jane Addams and Others, January 11, 1916 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916),10-12.

“Conditions in Stockyards Described in the Neill-Reynolds Report,” Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1906, pg. 4

Costin, Lela B. “Feminism, Pacifism, Internationalism, and the 1915 International Congress of Women,” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 5, No. 3-4 (1982), 300-315.

Gonzalez, Suronda. “Complicating Citizenship: Grace Abbott and the Immigrants’ Protective League, 1908-1921,” Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 56-75.

Hull House Collection, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Jane Addams Papers, 1860-1960 (microfilm edition).

Leonard, Henry B. “The Immigrants’ Protective League of Chicago, 1908-1921,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Autumn 1973), 271-284.

“Meet of Suffrage Chiefs: Chicago Women to Attend Executive Committee Session Today: Officers Will Be Chosen: Members Enthusiastic in Praise of the Progressive Party,” Chicago Tribune, October 1, 1912, pg. 5.

Patterson, David S. The Search for a Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (New York: Routledge, 2008).

Records of the Immigrants Protective League, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Papers (microfilm), Breckinridge Family Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Sorensen, John, ed., A Sister’s Memories: The Life and Work of Grace Abbott, From the Writings of Her Sister, Edith Abbott (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

“Urge Home for Immigrants,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1911, p. 5.

Wade, Louise C. “The Heritage from Chicago’s Early Settlement Houses,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Winter 1967), 411-441.

“Warns Women of Illinois: Dr. Anna H. Shaw Advises Suffragists to Avoid Party Ties,” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1912, p. 5.

“Will Ask Parties for Living Wage,” Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1912, pg. 7.

“Woman Puts O.K. on Neill Report,” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1906, pg. 2.

October 24, 2018October 14, 2025

The 1915 Trojan Women Tour

A grayscale vintage photo of a woman standing between two large structures, holding out her long, flowing dress with arms extended, creating a dramatic, wing-like effect.

1915 was a momentous year for women’s efforts for peace and suffrage. Jane Addams and others established the Women’s Peace Party (WPP), met at the International Congress for Women, formed the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (ICWPP), (known today as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF]), and held a massive Suffrage parade in New York City, N.Y. While they worked together for one ultimate goal — equality — they used a variety of methods, one of which was revisiting Ancient Greece.

Continue reading “The 1915 Trojan Women Tour”

October 18, 2018October 14, 2025

Guest Post: “From Hull-House to Herland”

A black-and-white portrait of a woman with dark hair parted in the middle, wearing a dress with a lace collar, looking over her shoulder toward the camera.

I had the pleasure of asking Lorraine Krall McCrary about her new article “From Hull-House to Herland: Engaged and Extended Care in Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” (Politics & Gender, August 2018, 1-21). She examines the writings and activities of Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gliman and how the two activists’ opinions on the roles women have in politics, society, and family differed. Continue reading “Guest Post: “From Hull-House to Herland””

July 19, 2017September 29, 2025

Battling a Ward Boss: Addams vs. Powers

Older man with white hair and mustache in a suit, smiling and standing next to a bouquet of flowers. — Alderman of the Nineteenth Ward Johnny Powers

To better the lives of poor immigrants and children through Hull-House, Jane Addams often had to involve herself in the issues her residents cared about, such as child labor regulation, establishments of juvenile courts, overpopulated schools, and sanitation. To ensure that the government’s laws heard the voice of the poor, Addams often challenged the status quo, which made political leaders uneasy. Addams specifically butted heads with the corrupt alderman of the Nineteenth Ward, Johnny Powers. Born in Ireland in 1852, Powers moved to America at age 20 and settled in Chicago. He became a politician for the Democratic Party and served as alderman almost until his death in 1930. Since 1892, Hull-House fought Powers to build a new school for neighborhood children, which he opposed. Although ultimately victorious in that fight, Addams tried to get Powers to clean up the garbage in Chicago streets by collecting 1,000 complaints but failed.

This was the start of a political battle between the two. When Addams supported his 1896 opponent, Powers fought back by eliminating the garbage inspector position held by Addams and placing supervision of these activities under the Ward superintendent. This angered Addams because she had previously succeeded in surveying the streets each morning and decreasing Chicago’s litter.

Powers maintained his political influence by purchasing votes. In 1898, Addams wrote: “Last Christmas our Alderman distributed six tons of turkeys, and four or more tons of ducks and geese . . . It is easiest to reach people in the holiday mood of expansive good will, but on their side it seems natural and kindly that he should do it.” Powers often financed and appeared at funerals as well to gain support, earning him the nickname, “The Mourner.” Addams wrote: “If the Alderman seizes upon festivities for expressions of his good will, much more does he seize upon periods of sorrow. At a funeral he has double advantage of ministering a genuine craving for comfort and solace, and at the same time of assisting at an important social function” (1898). Addams argued that this made him seem like a man with virtue; however, he did not strive to help individuals. At the end of the day, the streets were unclean, schools were overcrowded, and parks were unusable.

A woman in Victorian-era clothing sits at a table, resting one arm on an open book and looking directly at the camera, against a plain dark background. — Addams in 1896

In addition to owning two saloons, a gambling establishment, and a nice house, Powers sold city franchises and bought friends in the Council and courts. Addams demanded to know where he got his money from. “To their simple minds he gets it ‘from the rich,'” Addams wrote, “and so as long as he again gives it out to the poor, as a true Robin Hood, with open hand, they have no objections to offer” (1898).

In the 1898 elections, Addams supported Powers’s opponent, Simeon Armstrong. Because one-fifth of the voters’ jobs in the Nineteenth Ward depended on Powers’s largesse, it was a challenge for Addams to sway people’s self-interest towards a vote for Armstrong. She wrote, “If the so-called more enlightened members of the community accept public gifts from the man who buys up the Council, and the so-called less enlightened members accept individual gifts from the man who sells out the Council, we surely must take our punishment together” (1898).

Powers hit back against Addams in Chicago Tribune: “I am what my people like, and neither Hull House nor all the reformers in town can turn them against me,” he boasted. Powers claimed that Hull-House maligned the Ward, threatening, “Mark my word, a year from today there will be no such institution in the Nineteenth Ward.” Anonymous supporters of Powers sent violent letters to Addams during the election; but, others, like Professor William Hill, supported Hull-House, writing, “Those who make that institution their home have always regarded the people of the Nineteenth Ward as honest, hard-working citizens. Instead of standing on his own record, Powers is trying to shift the responsibility for neglected streets and empty houses upon somebody else” (1898).

A group of people are seated around several tables in a formal dining room, engaged in conversation and eating a meal. The room is decorated with wood paneling, patterned walls, and hanging light fixtures. — Addams seated with Hull-House residents, 1934

Powers won the 1898 election. Despite Addams’s support for his opponents, Powers won re-election for the next 30 years. Though she failed to remove Powers from office, Addams learned through the experience. She realized that she needed to better understand and help her neighbors’ lives before wading in. Entering the political world interfered with her connections with Hull-House’s neighbors and made it more difficult for her to assist them and form relationships with them. After the election, she returned to helping her neighbors directly as well as working with the Chicago Bureau of Charities, which began development in 1894.

Addams’s short-lived success in keeping the Ward’s streets clean also taught Chicago residents to understand how their political leaders should work, challenging Powers and his patronage system in a more indirect way. As Ray Stannard Baker wrote in “Hull House and the Ward Boss” in 1898, “If it does not succeed, at least the residents of the ward will have had a stirring lesson in political morality, which will clear a way for success at another time.”

Sources:

“Defi to John Powers: Antis Accept the Hull House as the Campaign Issue. ” Chicago Tribune, 3 Mar. 1898, p. 7.; Jane Addams, “Why the Ward Boss Rules,” Outlook 58, no.14 (April 2, 1898): 879-82.; Kendall. “Alderman John Powers’ Home Bombed by Political Rivals.” The Chicago Crime Scenes Project, 17 May 2009, Blogger.com, http://chicagocrimescenes.blogspot.com/2009/05/alderman-john-powers-home-bombed-by.html. Accessed 21 Jun. 2017.; “Powers and Cullerton Talk.” Chicago Tribune, 6 Apr. 1898, p. 10.; Ray Stannard Baker, “Hull House and the Ward Boss,” Outlook (March 26 1898): 769-771.; Schneiderhan, Erik. The Size of Others’ Burdens: Barack Obama, Jane Addams, and the Politics of Helping Others. Stanford University Press, 2015.; Scott, Anne Firor. “Saint Jane And The Ward Boss.” American Heritage, Dec. 1960, http://www.americanheritage.com/content/saint-jane-and-ward-boss. Accessed 28 Jun. 2017.; “War on Hull House” Chicago Tribune, 2 Mar. 1898, p. 12.

February 16, 2017July 29, 2026

Reconsidering Jane Addams’s Neighborhood Plan

This post was a paper delivered by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Urban History Seminar, held at the Chicago History Museum on February 16, 2017.

“I went to S. Clark St. this morning to show tenement houses there to [George Ward Springer] a youth of wealth who is inspired by the Holy Ghost to build model tenement houses,” Ellen Gates Starr wrote her sister in 1890. “I don’t mean that he professes this inspiration, but the source is undoubtedly no less. . . Mr. [Allen] Pond says his father is rich, & that he himself commands money.”[1]

When Starr and Jane Addams had selected the Hull home in 1889, with advice from Pond, they were already on the look-out for opportunities to re-build the slums. Renting rooms in the rundown Hull mansion from Helen Culver, who had just inherited the house and surrounding properties from her cousin Charles Hull, was most likely more than a coincidence. News of Culver’s spectacular inheritance of the Hull real estate empire was in the daily press at the time when Addams and Starr were house hunting. And Culver was a philanthropist receptive to the reform ideas of the young women. Culver, along with Allen Pond, and several other wealthy, but civic-minded Chicago women and men capitalists served as trustees when the Hull-House Association was first incorporated and backed Addams’s plans with money. Under Addams’s leadership slum property was obtained, cleared, and new buildings constructed. A coffee-house replaced the saloon, a neighborhood institution dominated by corrupt politicians and the liquor interests; gymnasium and playground were new additions to a neighborhood that Addams believed ignored the public recreative needs of citizens; the children’s building provided innovative approaches to child nurture and offered immigrant mothers instruction in scientific motherhood; art gallery and library, men’s and women’s clubs, space for meetings and adult classes and forums, for music concerts and dancing offered a new kind of social and cultural space free of the corrupting influences of crass commercialism, liquor, prostitutes, and corrupt politicians.

The complex, as it evolved, had political implications too. In 1898, having lost to the political machine, Addams used the expansion of a new building as a statement of opposition to the ward boss. “This [new] building will be right back of Hull house gymnasium and will be connected with the steam-heat and electric plants of the Hull house building. It will be a three-story brick structure, with what is known as an English basement. . . work will begin immediately. Considering how little Ald. Powers admires us,” added Miss Addams, “and how he would like to force us out of the 19th Ward, this addition to our buildings and our work seems more than enjoyable, even in a political point of view.” The building was the Jane Club, a residence for working girls.[2]

In building the Hull-House complex Addams was modeling her imagined neighborhood. I am using the term “imagined” in several ways: first, it is the social plan that Addams exhibits in her construction of buildings and in the invention of multiple uses within the space; it has political and social policy implications. Second, I use the term to identify Addams’s description or portrayal of the Near West Side and its people.

Third, I use the term “imagined neighborhood” to distinguish Addams’s representations from the real challenges her settlement agenda confronted among working class men and women. It was easier for Addams to gain the support of middle-class and wealthy capitalists concerned about class conflict and urban disorder for her projects to build model tenements and upgrade the alleys and streets. The challenges to engagement with adult neighbors were substantial: “I used to carry placards up and down the street, and into crowded saloons to get people into those [settlement] classes,” Hull-House resident Edward Burchard, the first male resident in 1890, explained. “Those [neighborhood] men did not care about art. They did not attend our college classes. There were a few selected people who came to them.”[3] Addams had referred to those selected few as the “transfigured few” and she had stopped the art exhibitions within four years of opening the Butler Art gallery, turning instead to the industrial shops and Labor Museum that was to become more central to the settlement.

Working-class discomfort with the bourgeois culture the settlement represented was part of the reason why trade union women left the attractive surroundings of Bowen Hall. In 1908 the Chicago chapter of the Women’s Trade Union League decided to meet in the Chicago Federation of Labor hall rather than in Hull-House’s women’s space. This rupture after a multi-year relationship was painful for the Hull-House residents and other middle-class allies associated with the union. The young women workers voted, they said, to move “coming out ‘flat footedly’ for trades unionism and the ‘labor atmosphere’ as against artistic surroundings in Bowen hall, formerly the meeting place of the league.”[4]

This evening, in the brief time I’ve got, I’d like to sketch out some ideas I’ve been working on along this theme of an imagined plan for the neighborhood that Addams hoped would become its reconstructed space. At the end of Edith Abbott’s book on tenement conditions in Chicago, there is a rendering of the plan for the Jane Addams Homes, the public housing project that is built only a few blocks west of the Hull-House settlement and opens in 1937, two years after Addams’s death. Department of the Interior secretary Harold Ickes, a longtime ally of Addams, had written the aging, but still active Addams in 1933, about site considerations for a public housing project in Chicago: “Frankly, I would like to have a slum clearance project as near Hull House as possible because that would give fullest opportunity of cooperation between your institution and the Federal Government.”[5] True to his progressive reform roots, Ickes was glad Addams was “sounding an optimistic note” for “real ‘slum clearance’ . . . in Chicago.” He wrote her: “I have been pushing it from this end, not only on account of my natural interest in Chicago but because it seems to me that it offers a wonderful demonstration point.”[6] Demonstration point is a key phrase. The Jane Addams Homes, initially intended to have built-in social services and connections to the social settlement in the neighborhood, most likely came closest to the “imagined” residential component envisioned by Addams.

Here the disconnect with her neighbors was most acute. Not all her neighbors were eager to abandon the possibility or reality of individual home ownership for a rental in public housing. Addams had rejected the ideal of home ownership for the working class years before. In 1900, the year she and Anita McCormick Blaine put together the City Homes Association to promote model tenements, Addams had told attendees at a meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social “that the individual ownership of a cramped up little house on a dwarfish little city lot was [not] ideally beneficial to the working man.” But two years later, speaking to the same group, Addams revealed she had learned how complicated property ownership in workers’ neighborhoods actually was. “We discovered several things which were very surprising, among them that many of the houses were owned or partially owned by the people living in them.” Addams found that the tenant and landlord were represented by the same type of person. “Their interests are identical, not in the larger sense, but in the immediate sense, and they stand together either in demanding or opposing certain regulations.”[7]

Many of the Hull-House neighbors saw value and promise in the old neighborhood and opposed the ideas of professionals who had taken their clues from the social settlement movement’s condemnation of tenement life and missed the complicated narrative of working-class and immigrant entrepreneurship and the great desire for homeownership as a step toward a life of middle class independence, the American dream. Addams had ignored stories of immigrant advancement through ladders of local retail commerce and she had criticized homeownership, especially as she saw family’s pooling the wages of their children and renting out to boarders.

The family histories I have gathered of Italians whose roots were firmly established in the thirty blocks mapped in the famous 1895 Hull-House Maps and in investigations on housing conditions from 1900 to 1936 tell a different story.

Father Stephen Giovangelo, Florence Scala’s nephew, now a retired Episcopal priest grew up in the family’s two flat, a stone’s throw from Hull-House. On his mother’s side, a great-grandmother and grandmother ran a family grocery near the old Holy Guardian Angel Church, east of Halsted. On his father’s side, his grandfather—Florence’s dad—owned a tailor shop. Florence and Ernie, Steve’s father, grew up as Hull-House kids; they were also Catholic parishioners, Ernie working after graduating from the University of Illinois-Urbana, for the Catholic Youth Organization, and later, with Florence, joining the neighborhood efforts organized by Hull-House resident Eri Hulbert, to develop a community-based plan to rehabilitate or conserve the sections of the neighborhood that, to the community, had value and a future. In the 1950s in Father Steve’s memory “the neighborhood was anything BUT ‘a ghetto’ or ‘slum’ as some of the city developers referred to it.”

Earlier Addams had come to a different conclusion. She acknowledged that Hull-House had not been able to marshal the public opinion capable of local political reform. In her eyes the neighborhood had deteriorated. “Slowly through the years one is forced to recognize that the increase of crime is connected with the general state of political corruption throughout the community as a whole,” Addams asserted in 1932. “No social institution can escape from the community which gives it birth and which either promotes or retards its operation.”[8] All the cultural activities, the best art and music, the great theatrical productions, could not protect against the street.[9]

How could Addams’s view of the neighborhood differ so substantially from the neighbors who fought so valiantly years later to save their humble blocks from clearance in preparation for the coming of the University of Illinois Chicago campus?

Addams dealt with immigrants but not with the diversity of culturally different institutional structures and ethnicity, or the commitment her neighbors had to owning their own houses and businesses. In not working with the potential energy for citizen’s activism by incorporating competing religious institutions, the powerful Protestant elites did not generate successful citizen-initiated planning. Jane Addams and the progressives were not against demolishing old neighborhoods and ignoring cultural, religious, and social anchors because they didn’t value them; they had come to change them. They were not particularly excited by the “street” and were disinterested in finding ways to fix up the houses and loan money for mortgages, or build affordable housing beyond the most meager efforts. Such strategies emanated instead from the neighborhood groups after the 1930s and, ultimately, in the 1950s were met with resistance from professional urban planners and public housing advocates and the real estate industry and city hall.

In 1935 Edith Abbott found there had been several housing reform movements in Chicago but very few improvements have come as a result of these efforts. “Certainly no one political group can be charged with responsibility for the failure to find the way out of our tenement problems” she concluded, and did not hazard a guess as to what role progressive reformers themselves might have had in the failures of reform efforts. Progressive era reformers mapped the neighborhood and stamped it as a “slum” and began a tradition of using the “best” worst case to argue for critically needed reforms of sanitation facilities, housing and work conditions, at the same time leaving out positive signs of social and occupational mobility inside the neighborhood.[10] Abbott, echoing Addams, held great enthusiasm “for new and better houses and gardens for the families living on low wages, or no wages” with the prospect that the expenditure of public funds in the long run will be “counterbalanced by smaller demands for hospitals, juvenile courts, reformatories, courts and prisons.”

There was something even more basic in the “imagined” community that Addams had created that can account for the ultimate clash of interests between the people and the reformers. Ellen Starr did not agree completely with the direction that Hull-House settlement was taking early on in the experiment. Her disagreement, which she voiced, distanced her from Jane Addams. In 1892 she accused Hull-House of being merely “an excuse for the things we ought to do and be and don’t and aren’t.”[11] She worried about the contradictions of offering bourgeois culture to workers but not sharing power with them. “If we don’t wish working people to stand upon the same ground with us, if we believe that there is an eternal distinction, if we believe in caste, no matter how we disguise it, then why shouldn’t we let them alone? Why insult people by saying to them, ‘you are different, you will be different always, you can never be as we, knowing false and true, beautiful and ugly, but we wish to be kind to you, we want you to enjoy in your poor capacity, what you are capable of enjoying, and so we come and give you this and this.'”[12]

Although the settlement was also a meeting place for unpopular groups from the neighborhood, there was no thought that a neighbor who was active in the Hull-House Woman’s Club, or the men’s political group should take a place on the board of trustees. In fact, the trustees did not include neighborhood people until 1943 when Alex Elson, now a young lawyer who had grown up in the neighborhood and participated in Hull-House as a youngster and then as a young adult in the dramatic clubs, was selected by the board of trustees.[13]

Hull-House had gained its reputation in large part as an interpreter of the immigrant urban experience from that neighborhood. By the late 1920s Mexicans had moved into the Hull-House neighborhood and, more problematic to the Eurocentric programs of Hull-House, African Americans from the South were finding their way to the Maxwell Street neighborhood, an area south and east of Hull-House that had once been the home for Jewish immigrants. These demographic and economic changes were reshaping Chicago and other American cities and the settlement houses that had been situated in European immigrant communities. Few settlements began, as Lea Taylor of the Chicago Commons put it, “to take stock of the work” to determine whether they were meeting the needs of the neighborhood and “whether much more should not some how be done to get more of neighbors’ participation in meeting community problems, as well as in helping in the work of the settlement.”[14] Hull-House, ironically the leader of the settlement movement in the 1890s, had not taken stock of its role in the neighborhood, or looked introspectively at its programs or goals until the arrival of Charlotte Carr in 1937. A New Deal liberal with close ties to organized labor, Carr immediately initiated more community-based programs. Hull-House trustee William Deknatel suggested that Carr’s problems would soon be solved because “the neighborhood was disappearing” and the settlement should re-think its relationship to local projects.

Addams had demonstrated a similar attitude in the 1930s when she encouraged the City of Chicago to locate a municipal airport north of Hull-House in the Harrison-Halsted area, the heart of the Greek community, as a development stimulus. She had also negotiated the sale of the property owned by the Chicago Hebrew Institute on Taylor Street for the public housing project that would bear her name. She, along with Edith Abbott and Harold Ickes had advocated slum clearance and public housing as the solution to the tenement problem in the old Hull-House neighborhood. The commitment to the neighborhood as a place of meaning that had value and should be conserved was never the settlement’s or Jane Addams’s agenda. The cultivation of “neighborliness” not the neighborhood was its goal.

[1] Ellen Gates Starr to Mary Houghton Starr Blaisdell, 18 and 22 May 1890, Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. The young capitalist referred to is George Ward Springer born 14 Dec 1868 in Abingdon, Illinois; attended Northwestern University Academy; got a B.S. Northwestern University in 1890; in real estate business for himself in 1902; Republican; Episcopalian; village trustee Wilmette, Illinois 1897-98; village president 1900-02. The Book of Chicagoans (1911), vol. 2, 636; Alumni Record, College of Liberal Arts, Northwestern University 1903, p. 212.

[2] “Jane Club’s New Home,” Chicago Daily News, April 2, 1898, 1.

[3] Edward L. Burch quoted in “School Center History in Chicago,” 292.

[4] Women’s Trade Union League Quits Holding Meetings at Hull-House. Pick Federation Hall instead; Jane Addams absent from the meeting during hot discussion of question. “Bowen hall, Hull house, was tabooed by vote yesterday, after a spirited discussion at a meeting of the Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago. It was the first meeting of the league in the hall of the Chicago Federation of Labor, 275 La Salle street, and the discussion was precipitated over the question of coming out ‘flat footedly’ for trades unionism and the ‘labor atmosphere’ as against artistic surroundings in Bowen hall, formerly the meeting place of the league.

“After nearly all the ‘prominent’ members had had their say about the proposition to move from Bowen hall, the ‘labor atmosphere’ won by a heavy majority. Miss Jane Addams, who is a member of the league, and was a constant attendant at the meetings in Bowen hall, was ‘visibly absent.’”

“Nothing was brought out in the debate to indicate a breach had occurred between Mrs. Raymond Robins, president of the league, and Miss Jane Addams over the latter’s attitude toward the former’s husband on, say, school board questions. An undercurrent of thought among the women, however, drifted strongly in that direction.[Note that Jane Addams had voted against the appointment of a superintendent who favored teachers’ unionism, the position of Margaret Haley, and was roundly criticized by Haley and her supporters & those in the labor movement who favored unionization of teachers along the lines of the Chicago Federation of Labor. Raymond Robins had supported the pro-labor union superintendent candidate favored by Haley.]

“’O, no. Our relations with Hull-house have been so lovely. We really regret the necessity to leave Bowen hall.’ These were the sentiments expressed by both Mrs. Robins and Mrs. Corinne Brown, who made the motion to ‘move from Bowen hall to Federation hall, as a permanent meeting place.’”

“The question of meeting place came up after a constitution and platform for the league were adopted. Mrs. Corinne Brown was the first to gain the floor.

“’I favor federation hall for the reason that here we will feel at home, while in Bowen hall we have been under restraint,’ said Mrs. Brown. ‘Here we can speak freely.’”

“This brought Miss Mary McDowell to her feet instantly with a protest against Mrs. Brown’s utterances.

“’I must take exception to Mrs. Brown’s statement that we have been under restraint at Hull house,’ said she. ‘I am sure we have been as free to express ourselves in Bowen hall as anywhere.’”

“’Well, I didn’t mean that any one restrained us there,’ Mrs. Brown hastened to explain.

“’What I meant was that we were under the natural restraint of being guests and not as free as in our own home.’”

“Mrs. Robins felt it was time to explain. She said the object of moving from Hull house was to come in closer touch with the labor movement and that an option had been obtained on Federation hall.

“’I object to leaving Hull house because I believe we are going to limit our usefulness by meeting in Federation hall,’ said Mrs. Harriet Van derVaart. ‘We will be looked upon simply as another labor movement.’

“’I favor Bowen hall because this place is known as a union headquarters, and many girls will be afraid to come here for fear their employers will learn of it,’ said Miss Anna Nicholes.

“’Federation hall suits me,’ said Miss Agnes Nestor. ‘The surroundings are more beautiful in Bowen hall, but the Halsted street car service is awful.’

“At this point Mrs. Louis F. Post arose and said: ‘I believe now that this league is the real thing.’”

“’This league has always been the <real thing,>’ Miss McDowell fired back. “Miss McDowell wanted the question postponed a month, but Mrs. Robins decided immediate action was imperative and a vote was taken by ballot. It stood 51 to 20 in favor of ‘closer touch with labor.’” [“League of Women Quits Hull House,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 10, 1908, pg. 3.]

[5] Harold L. Ickes to JA, Washington, D.C., Dec. 27, 1933, Swarthmore College Peace Collection Jane Addams Papers Series 1 in JAP microfilm Reel 25-0598.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Jane Addams, “The Housing Problem in Chicago,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 20 (July 1902), 99-100.

[8] “Miss Addams Gives Views on Chicago Gang Disorders.” The Sun, Baltimore, Jan. 18, 1932, pg. 12.

[9] Jane Addams to West Side Sportsman’s Athletic Association, Chicago, Dec. 4, 1931, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Jane Addams Memorial Collection Hull-House Association Records, in JAP reel 22-1305; William John Granata to Jane Addams, Chicago [Granata & Euzzino Attorneys at Law, 650 South Halsted Street], Jan. 11, 1932, in JAP reel 23-0558-0559; Jane Addams to My dear “Greek,” [William John Granata] drafts, January 15, 1932, Baltimore, JAP reel 23-0554-0557; [Greek ]Wm John Granata to Jane Addams, Chicago, Jan. 11, 1932, in JAP reel 23-0560.

[10] Rima Lunin Schultz, “Introduction,” Hull-House Maps & Papers. A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, together with Comments and Essays on Problems growing out of the Social Conditions. By Residents of Hull-House (Chicago & Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007; reprint of 1895 edition), 1-2; 5, 18, 33-34.

[11] Elizabeth Palmer Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror: The Progressive Woman and the Settlement Experience,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 1981, 30.

[12] “Chicago’s Hull House.” Report on an Address by Ellen Starr, 1895, Hull-House Scrapbook, III, JAMC, Spec. Col. Daley Library, UIC.

[13] Alex Elson Oral Interview transcript, OH-074 [interviewed by Stuart J. Hecht] October 12, 1980, 13, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[14] Minutes, June 7, 1924, Folder 2350, Graham Taylor Papers, Midwest Manuscript Collection, The Newberry Library.

October 14, 2016July 27, 2026

The “Real” and the “Imagined” Neighborhood: The Hull-House Maps and the Progressive Narrative of Urbanism

This post was given by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Urban History Association Eighth Biennial Conference, on October 13-16, 2016.

Urban historians have been rethinking the relationship between urban space and religion in late nineteenth-century cities.[1] The work of Jane Addams and her fellow reformers at Hull-House, visualized in the 1895 Hull-House nationalities and wages maps[2], has cast a long shadow over scholars’ understanding of urban immigrant neighborhoods. The maps began a trend that identified maladjustment and pathology in these neighborhoods.[3] In selecting the thirty or so blocks east of Halsted Street to make the best “worst” case of bad housing and sweatshop conditions during their anti-sweatshop political campaign, Hull-House residents, with the leadership of Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, shaped the neighborhood in a lasting way in the public mind. Ironically, those unmapped blocks in the vicinity of Hull-House (including the settlement itself) which had better housing and cultural and religious institutions of value, were also “imagined” as a slum area and, eventually, deemed suitable for land clearance projects.

By the time that Hull-House resident Edith Abbott, now dean of the School of Social Work Administration at the University of Chicago, completed Tenements of Chicago 1908-1935, the images of the Near West Side slums had become iconic.[4] In this narrative, workers were not seen as community builders; working-class homeownership, if noted, was seen as a trap, an illusion of progress.

The intellect driving the maps and papers project was Florence Kelley, who had become a socialist during her graduate studies in Europe, and had worked with Frederick Engels in England, absorbing his methods of using government statistics. She was prepared to study Chicago’s sweatshops and factories.[5] As State Factory Inspector, Kelley and her assistants were already collecting data on tenements when in 1893 she was asked by Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Labor and statistician, to select the local area to be canvassed by census men for a federal study of slums in Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia.[6] Kelley was influenced by Charles Booth’s maps of poverty in London; she saw the opportunity to use the data from the canvass to create maps that would dramatically demonstrate sweatshop workers’ deplorable conditions.[7]

The thirty or so blocks selected were on the east side of the Nineteenth Ward. For many, this was the Holy Family parish, settled by Catholics before the Civil War. In 1893 it was one of the largest Irish Catholic parishes in the United States. Hull-House, founded in 1889, was a scrappy newcomer to the neighborhood, its institutional footprint puny in comparison to the Catholic streetscape.[8] In 1893, twelve Catholic schools existed in the Hull-House neighborhood.[9]

Addams’s Protestant mindset imagined immigrants “mov[ing] constantly from one wretched lodging to another;” as she told the Chicago Women’s Club, “they live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition, or public spirit; without social organization of any kind.”[10]

The maps, (and the major papers in the volume) by focusing on the sweatshop conditions of that one segment of the economy, ignored how local people actually defined where they lived, who they were, what they owned. Addams, in her preface, and Agnes Holbrook, who worked with the data to construct the maps and wrote the notes and comments for the maps, know how inadequate the representations are and they stress the transitory quality. It is a snapshot of a moment, captured in one dimension, and it is just a piece of a much more complex social fabric.

The religious factor actually loomed large in the consciousness of Progressive reformers who were overwhelmingly Protestant. Urban historians in neglecting the religious factor have ignored the anti-Catholic bias in the Hull-House maps. Implicit in the nationalities map is anxiety about the Catholic presence in the neighborhood. The nationalities mapped are actually classes or categories constructed from a “mental map” about race, religion, and ethnicity.[11]

Briefly, the color white represents English-speaking people, including English, English-Canadians, Scotch, all Americans of native parentage, and children born in this country of foreign parents who were over ten years of age, or, if younger, were in attendance in public schools.[12] Children under the age of ten of foreign parents who attended parochial schools were still aggregated as foreign. This reflected the Progressive Era’s anxiety about the influence of Catholicism in the formation of new citizens and the use of foreign languages in some parochial schools.[13]

Two other English speaking groups were placed in separate categories: “Negroes”[14] and the Irish (green) “form[ing] so distinct and important an element in our politics and civic life that a separate representation has been accorded them.”[15] The Hull-House political battles against the ward boss had already begun.[16] Imagine if the Irish and their children in parochial schools were “white” in the maps—-the neighborhood would not seem so “foreign.” Were Italians “white” on arrival? Could Irish Catholics assimilate into American culture even after many generations of citizenship in this country?

The wages map, covers the same blocks; the colors now indicate income by dwelling place.[17] The largest class in the district was colored blue and represented families earning from $5 to $10 a week, or in today’s equivalency, $125 to $250 a week.

The papers argue against blaming the victims of economic inequality and social injustice for their deplorable living conditions, instead portray them as hard working[18] underestimate the private associational strength of immigrants, and do not include a chapter on the Irish and Holy Family parish, the heart of the community.[19]

Had the project mapped the west side of the Nineteenth Ward, starting with the block where the settlement house was located (yes, the settlement does not get “mapped”) the narrative would have been dramatically different showing a more “mixed” neighborhood economically, with prosperous sections and brick residences, prosperous shops owned by immigrants, and lots of parochial schools and churches.

Even the east side, the area mapped, was not all of one piece. Italian families who lived in this congested “slum” did not describe it that way. The Tarsitano Italian family did not feel “poor” or characterize their living conditions as substandard. Three generations remained in the old neighborhood. In 1901 Leopoldo Tarsitano had settled in the east end around the Italian parish of Holy Guardian Angel. The Tarsitano family lived for several years in a flat and Leopoldo worked as a grocery cart peddler but by 1907 the family had saved enough money to buy their own two-story store front brick home located just west of Holy Guardian Angel Church, which was at 717 Forquer. Located east of Halsted Street, the church and school were in the area “mapped” as one of the worst industrial districts in Chicago. The Tarsitano store was on the first floor with the family living in the upper levels.

The Tarsitano children and grandchildren all participated in the cultural and recreational opportunities offered by Hull-House and were devotees of the summer camp in Waukegan. They attended church and parish school and, all of Leopoldo’s four granddaughters attended St. Mary High School in the vicinity. One became a physician, after graduating from Mundelein, the Catholic women’s college run by the Sisters of Charity Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs), and Loyola University Medical School; two became school teachers, graduating from Northern Illinois University; and another sister married and had children. Two of Leopold’s grandsons attended St. Ignatius Jesuit High School and Our Lady of Pompeii High School, the former attending the University of Illinois briefly and ending up with a business career at the managerial level; the latter graduated from Loyola University, did graduate work at De Paul and at the University of Nebraska and became a political science professor at the College of Du Page.[20]

The Italians in the Holy Guardian Angel parish were a stable, hard working people. They built the working class church of brick–more squat than tall. By 1910 its Sunday School claimed to be “one of the largest in the world” and in 1920 the congregation raised money for a new school building. Finding themselves located in the path of the Dan Ryan Expressway, in 1959 the old parish planned a new combination church and school structure at 860 West Cabrini, near Hull-House. The neighborhood was in a state of flux, but the parishioners had received assurances from the Mayor’s office as well as the chancery of the Archdiocese of Chicago that they had moved to a safe block that would not be part of any urban renewal plan. Urban politics in Chicago is not known for transparency or integrity. Hardly “settled in,” the new school and convent was demolished in 1963 to make way for the University of Illinois.

My argument here is that an unexpected outcome of the housing surveys was the conceptualization of working-class neighborhoods as one-dimensional places. The Tarsitano narrative is one of many similar stories of immigrant entrepreneurship, property ownership, intergenerational progress, and communal investments building neighborhoods of rich religious infrastructures.

There were plenty of problems in the Forquer and Halsted environs, including poverty and crime. Housing varied. The “imagined” neighborhood of the Protestant lady reformers” of good character” as community activist Florence Scala’s mother defined them[21], however, had made slum images iconic and had relegated the communal and social life of Forquer Street off of the map.[22] Florence Scala led the fight to save her neighborhood. As her nephew Father Steve Giovangelo explained: “Churches and Hull House co-existed and were at the center of social life.”

A remarkable, but missed opportunity, of Edith Abbott’s work was her use of parish histories for data and her acknowledgement that “these parochial histories provide some interesting and neglected source materials for the study of the social history of our American cities.“[23] My research, and that of others in the field, aims to bring the religious factor back in: This Da Prato map of Chicago clearly identifies the religious factor in urban life as ubiquitous.

[1] Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Suellen Hoy, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Ellen Skerrett, Born in Chicago: A History of Chicago’s Jesuit University (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2002); Rima Lunin Schultz and Ellen Skerrett, “‘Sister Builders’ in Chicago,” American Catholic Studies Newsletter, Vol. 42, Number 1 (Spring 2015).

[2] The Residents of Hull-House, Hull-House Maps and Papers. A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions. Introduction by Rima Lunin Schultz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007; facsimile reprint 1895 edition). The maps reflect data gathered by government men in April 1893. There are 10 essays, and an appendix that describes Hull-House and its work, and includes photographs of Hull-House’s exterior and interior space. There are no photographs or illustrations of the neighborhood. Five of the essays are about sweatshops, garment workers, and the state of public charity; three describe the Italians; the Jews; and the Bohemians respectively; Ellen Gates Starr and Jane Addams, co-founders in 1889, describe their ideas about art and labor, and the settlement house as a factor in the labor movement in two separate essays.

[3] Florence Kelley and Alzina Parsons Stevens contributed “Wage-earning Children” in Hull-House Maps and Papers which includes charts of the measurements of defective Chicago factory-children that were made by Dr. Bayard Holmes, from measurements taken in 1893-94, in the office of Florence Kelley, State Factory Inspector of Illinois, 87-88.

[4] Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago. 1908-1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), ix-x.

[5] Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), 102-03.

[6] Carroll D. Wright, “Introduction,” in Wright, The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia (1894 reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970) explains the federally funded projects. Four government men came to Chicago and conducted the door-to-door canvass supplied by Wright; Kelley selected the blocks to be surveyed.

[7]The area selected to be “mapped” is located across the street from the Hull-House settlement– between Harrison on the north and Roosevelt Road (12th Street) on the south; from the east side of Halsted on the west, to the south Loop–the area around Clark Street and Plymouth Court. It is an area of residences–cottages, tenements, two-and-four-flats–, factories, warehouses, railroad yards, stores, and brothels. Most of the people lived in various grades of housing in about thirty small blocks between Halsted and the river. East of the river the five residential blocks, crowded with people of color, were adjacent to the vice or brothel district.

[8] “The Little Sisters of the Poor,” Chicago Times (August 26, 1877): 8. Ironically, the first old age home run by the Little Sisters was in Charles Hull’s residence. The Hull family had moved out of the neighborhood during the Civil War period. The Little Sisters outgrew the Hull house soon after and moved to as larger institutional location they had built on Harrison Street, still in the neighborhood.

[9] Historian Ellen Skerrett documents twelve Catholic schools in the Hull-House neighborhood in 1892: Convent Academy of the Sacred Heart, opened fall 1860, 485 [1258] W. Taylor Street ; A free school at the northwest corner of Taylor and Lytle streets for girls of Holy Family parish, 1860; additional buildings for the Sacred Heart Academy complex were constructed in 1864 and 1886; Holy Family Boys School, new building at 462 [approx. 1231] S. Morgan Street] opened 1865; St. Ignatius College, 413 [1076] W. 12^th Street [Roosevelt Road] opened 1870 (also enrolled young boys);St. Aloysius School, new building at 210 [631] W. Maxwell Street opened 1870; Holy Guardian Angel School, 168 [ 711] W. Forquer Street [Arthington Street] opened 1874;St. Joseph School, on W. 13^th Street near Loomis Street [1413 W. 13^th Street] opened 1876 ;St. Agnes School, 530 [approx. 1361] S. Morgan Street opened 1887; Ephpheta School for the Deaf, 409 [1100] S. May Street in operation by 1890 (see attached Tribune article on Eliza Allen Starr, March 16, 1890);St. Francis of Assisi School, new building at southwest corner of 12^th and Newberry Avenue opened 1884 ;Notre Dame [French] School, new building at Oregon [Flournoy] and Sibley Street [approx. 1338 W. Flournoy] opened 1885; St. Wenceslaus [Bohemian] School, new building at 185 [710] W. DeKoven Street opened in 1893. Sources: “Province of Chicago,” [1890 statistics compiled on the Archdiocese of Chicago], in James J. McGovern, Souvenir of the Silver Jubilee in the Episcopacy of His Grace The Most Rev. Patrick Augustine Feehan, Archbishop of Chicago, 1890 (Privately printed, 1891), 242-253; Brother Thomas M. Mulkerins, S.J., Holy Family Parish Chicago: Priests and People, ed. Joseph J. Thompson (Chicago: Universal Press, 1923); Rev. Msgr. Harry C. Koenig, ed., A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago 2 vols. (Chicago: the Archdiocese of Chicago, 1980).

[10] “They move constantly from one wretched lodging to another; they live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition, or public spirit; without social organization of any kind.” [46-0481] And she also repeats that “[p]ractically nothing is done to remedy this.” [46-0481]She calls on those who have the “social tact and training, the large houses and traditions of custom and hospitality [who] live in other parts of the city” to stop the “fatal drifting apart” another phrase that is going to be repeated. Jane Addams, “Outgrowths of Toynbee Hall,” December 3, 1891, [address delivered to the Chicago Woman’s Club], in JAMC (reel 46-0480-0496), Special Collections, Daley Library, UIC.

[12] Holbrook explains that “it would be misleading to include children under ten years living in a foreign colony, not in attendance upon schools where English is sure to be used, speaking a foreign language, and, although born in this country, ignorant of American life, manners, people, and of the English tongue.” Ibid., 15.

[13] “It would be misleading,” Holbrook writes, “to include children under ten years of age living in a foreign colony, not in attendance upon schools where English is sure to be used, speaking a foreign language, and, although born in this country, ignorant of American life, manners, people, and of the English tongue.” Holbrook, “Map Notes and Comments,” 15.

[14] Ibid., 16-17.

[15] Holbrook, “Map Notes and Comments,” 16.

[16] Jane Addams’s experiences at the local ward level first as garbage inspector and then as a leading voice opposing Alderman Powers in 1899-1898 were eye-opening; by 1900 Addams could critique the reformers as well as the ward politicians, seeing the issue of local politics in a more complex way than had been possible when she first encountered the “boss.” “Jane Addams Wears a Star: Appointed to the Force of Garbage Inspectors by Commissioner Kent,” Chicago Record (April 25, 1895), 6; Jane Addams to Henry Demarest Lloyd, December 22, 1895, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Henry Demarest Lloyd Papers in JAMC (Reel 2-1829-1830), Special Collections, The University Library, UIC; “Two Women and A Man—Jane Addams, Amanda Johnson and John Powers: Remarkable Results Achieved by Womanly Influence Against Overwhelming Odds in the Nineteenth Ward,” Chicago Times-Herald (January 30, 1898), 25; Jane Addams, “Why the Ward Boss Rules,” Outlook 58, no. 14 (April 2, 1898), 881-882.

[17] Six categories ranging from less than $5 a week to over $20 were depicted: most of the households fell in the $5 to $10 range (blue); the poorest category (black) represented an average weekly family income of $5 or less. In today’s dollars approximately, households $5 or less a week are making under $125 per week; households making from $5 to $10 per week were making from $125 to $250 dollars a week in today’s dollars. (formula is $1 = $25)

[18] Humpal-Zeman, “The Bohemians of Chicago,” in HHM&P, 118.

[19]In “Hull House, Chicago: An Effort Toward Social Democracy,” Forum, October 1892, Jane Addams states that: “There are seven churches and two missions in the [Nineteenth] ward. All of these are small and somewhat struggling, save the large Catholic church [Holy Family] connected with the Jesuit College [St. Ignatius] on the south boundary of the ward and the French Catholic church [Notre Dame de Chicago] on the west boundary. There are but three out of these nine religious centres in which the service is habitually conducted in English.” The fact that English is only spoken in three out of the nine religious institutions is particularly upsetting to Addams. Addams also ignores the twelve Catholic schools in the Nineteenth Ward already established by 1892. “Province of Chicago,” [1890 statistics compiled on the Archdiocese of Chicago], in James J. McGovern, Souvenir of the Silver Jubilee in the Episcopacy of His Grace The Most Rev. Patrick Augustine Feehan, Archbishop of Chicago, 1890 (Privately printed, 1891), 242-253; Brother Thomas M. Mulkerins, S .J., Holy Family Parish Chicago: Priests and People, ed. Joseph J. Thompson (Chicago: Universal Press, 1923); Rev. Msgr. Harry C. Koenig, ed., A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago 2 vols. (Chicago: the Archdiocese of Chicago, 1980).

[20] Rima Lunin Schultz, “Public School ‘Secularists’ vs. Women Religious: Competing Visions for Educating Catholic Immigrants in Jane Addams’s Progressive Era Chicago, 1890-1925,” chapter in Crossings and Dwellings, edited by Kyle Roberts and Steven Schloesser, (Netherlands: Brill Publishing, forthcoming 2016-17).

[21] Father Steven Giovangelo, “Memo to Rima Lunin Schultz,” June 30, 2013, in author’s possession.

[22] Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago. 1908-1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), ix-x.

[23] Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago 1908-1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), xi.

July 20, 2016October 14, 2025

Questions About Settlements? Ask Jane!

Hull-House-Door_UIC-JAMC Neg 557 — The main entry to Hull House. (Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago).

How many people today know what settlements were? If you have heard of them, they conjure up black and white, or sepia images of large buildings in urban neighborhoods, operated by earnest men and women. Or images of immigrant children in classes or urban playgrounds.

When Jane Addams founded Hull-House in 1889 the idea was a new one and part of her work was in popularizing not only the settlement, but the ideas behind it. The first settlement, and the one that inspired Addams and Ellen Gates Starr to found Hull-House was Toynbee Hall, a British settlement located in London’s East End that was founded in 1884. The first settlement in the United States was Neighborhood house, established in 1886 by Stanton Coit.

The idea of the settlement was simple–to bring education and social welfare to the people who lived and worked in impoverished cities. In the United States, settlements were also known as places that helped stir the melting pot of immigration. What was unique about the settlement movement, compared with other Progressive Era charitable efforts, was that the settlement workers moved in to the slum neighborhoods they sought to help, and they sought to act as neighbors, not distant benefactors to the working poor. Addams and other settlement workers wanted to understand the lives of immigrants and the working-class not be analyzing them, but by living side-by-side and helping when they could.

In the December 5, 1905 Toledo Daily Capital, Addams’ theory was described as:

that every man is an individual and equally capable of good. The Hull House idea is to develop the individual. Miss Addams also stated that a much larger number of immigrants could be taken care of in this country and assimilated to advantage than was being done now.

When Addams lectured, she often answered questions about her work. Some questions that were reported included:

What about anarchy in the slums?

I think the cry of anarchy has been greatly exaggerated in America. There is not nearly as much of it as some people seem to think. Much of the violation of law in the slums and among the foreigners is due to ignorance of the law rather than the result of criminal intentions.

How many children are taken care of at the Hull House every day?

We have a day nursery and this takes care of an average of forty children a day.

Are there any day nurses or visitors in connection with Hull House who visit the homes of those in your district?

We never go to any house unless sent for or there is some good reason for our visit. We never make it a practice to invade the homes of the poor.

Is there any religious instruction at Hull House?

No, there are no religious exercises at Hull House on account of the different beliefs of those in the house. We have Roman and Greek Catholics and Jews in addition to other creeds and denominations.

What are the political opinions of the voters of the settlement district?

That depends entirely on which party gets hold of them first. Their political beliefs are easily subject to change. For instance the Italians formerly were almost entirely Republicans. Now, however, they are swimming over to Democracy. The Russian Jews are mostly socialists. Other nationalities have similar political principles. In Chicago there is so much intense interest in ward and city politics that national politics are entirely lost sight of in the shuffle.

Is there any drinking in the Hull House?

No, there is no drinking in Hull House, but there is a great deal of it among certain classes in the slums. Most of the Jews congregate in the shops and little stores instead of in the saloons. Formerly there was very little drunkenness among the Italians when they drank only light wines. Now they are learning to drink the American beer and whisky and drunkenness among them is on the increase.

What is being done to counteract drinking by the Hull House?

We try to counteract it mainly by means of amusements. The social feature of the saloon s what appeals to most of them and so we give Saturday evening parties, dances and socials. The saloon dance hall is one of the great pitfalls of the city and we try to oppose it in particular. We have a big coffee room but it is not a great success for the reason that only a few care for coffee in the evening.

Settlements were one solution proposed by progressive reformers to alleviate the social problems caused by increasing numbers of new immigrants and rapid urbanization. Rather than build walls to keep people out, or hem them into crowded slums, Addams and other social workers sought to learn about them, live with them, and understand their cultures; all in an effort to help them navigate American life. She believed in treating her neighbors with respect and as intelligent and capable individuals who could contribute mightily to American society.

For more on settlement houses in Chicago, see the University of Illinois at Chicago’s photo exhibit, “Changing Neighborhoods: Photographs of Social Reform from 7 Chicago Settlement Houses.”

December 16, 2015September 30, 2025

The Spirit of Christmas at Hull-House

For a look at how Jane Addams and the Hull-House residents celebrated the Christmas season, we have reproduced Amalie Hannig’s 1911 article “Christmas at Hull-House,” which was published in the Ladies Home Journal. Hannig was the co-founder and director at Hull-House’s Music School, which was opened in 1893.

Christmas at Hull-House

The activities at Hull-House cover a wide field at any time of the year. About nine thousand people come to us each week during the winter months. But when Christmas approaches Hull-House appears like a huge ant-hill where all the inhabitants are turning their efforts with great intensity into one channel–into making this particular Christmas better than any of its predecessors.

To begin with the small people: A Christmas play, performed by children for all the club children, is given in our theater and the same performance is presented three times before different audiences of at least two hundred and fifty wide-eyed and breathless children each time, and when the performance is again twice repeated for their parents there is no loss of interest. It is difficult to find a suitable children’s play that brings in good old Santa Claus and a Christmas tree. But usually this is done by using a fairy tale that is elastic enough to admit a Christmas touch at the end.

A man in uniform hands a package to a group of children and adults wearing winter clothing, standing in front of a large pile of wrapped parcels. — This photo shows a similar distribution of Christmas baskets to the poor–in the above image it is the Chicago Salvation Army’s 1906 Christmas distribution. (Chicago History Museum via Chicago Collections).

If anybody happens to see our large drawing-room on the day before Christmas he will be inclined to believe that he has accidentally dropped into a grocery store. His nostrils, too, will be greeted by all the characteristic odors. Rows of market-baskets fill the middle of the large space. In one corner of the rooms stand barrels filled with chickens, sacks of potatoes and onions, boxes of various groceries–as coffee, tea, sugar–boxes of apples, oranges and candy; another corner is stacked with small Christmas trees; and all these things send forth and mingle with their particular odors. On large tables and on all available chairs packages containing warm, comfortable wearing apparel, dress goods or shoes and an endless variety of toys are awaiting distribution. Soon many hands begin to sort and label, and by noon three hundred baskets are filled, varying according to the sizes of the families to whom they are addressed.

By the evening all baskets have disappeared; the little Christmas trees alone are still waiting. But at about nine o’clock a most delightful and mysterious activity begins. Each little tree, accompanied by candles, tinsel and all sorts of fascinating decorations, is brought forth and carried to some household in our neighborhood where an expectant, smiling mother is ready and waiting. The children are safely asleep; the small, and for the most part very poor, dwelling is clean and shiny and shows itself at its best; a table is ready to receive the tree and the presents. Quickly the tree is trimmed and the candles are put on the safe branches, and, after a friendly exchange of Christmas greetings, “Santa Claus” retires, leaving the rest to Mother. Back he goes to Hull-House to fetch another tree and place it in another home. Sometimes it happens that the last “Santa Claus” returns from his errand at about one or two o’clock in the morning. Twenty-eight trees were sent out last Christmas.

Some of us remember how on one Christmas Eve a tree and some presents were taken to an Irish mother who supported her six children and three of her dead sister’s children by scrubbing day and night. Even on this evening she was not expected back in her three-roomed home until half-past twelve. When “Santa Claus” appeared at this late hour, loaded down with gifts for ten, he found six children sleeping peacefully in one bed–three at the foot and three at the top–in one room, and three others were in another room. Nine stockings were hanging up; and who would be surprised to learn that some of them showed holes so big that an orange was dropped in first so that other articles might not fall through? “Santa Claus” had to move on tiptoe, hardly daring to breathe, while he made his arrangements in the same room with the sleeping children.

Out Italian friends gladly receive the American “Santa Claus.” Their homes are made to look festive and bright. The freshly scoured floor, still damp, is covered with newspapers, a little altar adorns the wall, the lamp of devotion is lighted, and when the little tree, gaily trimmed, stands on the floor before the altar the Virgin and Child seem to crown it with their blessed presence.

One feast at Hull-House fills hosts and guests alike with deep satisfaction. The Friendly Club, consisting of whole families of our people, come to a Christmas dinner, a real turkey dinner where everything is “grand” and “delicious.” Here are parents and their children dining with a joy that might make the chief cook of a King envious. Such a precious fowl as a turkey is an event to all of the diners. Last year about two hundred and sixty guests were placed in our spacious coffee-house, and when thirty-five late comers found all seats occupied the children politely gave up their legitimate places to the older people and stood between the chairs.

An effort is made, however, to observe Christmas in such a way that is shall not consist solely of presents and dinners and parties, but that the spiritual side shall also be accentuated. Handel’s “Messiah,” rendered every year through the courtesy of a chorus from Evanston, has been a source of great pleasure to our neighbors, to those of the Christian faith and to many of our Jewish friends. Perhaps the most spontaneous celebration of the birth of Jesus finds expression in our own Christmas concert, which has been given for eighteen years on the Sunday before Christmas. On this page is printed a recent program.

This concert consists of folk songs, carols and canons through which the people of many lands have for generations striven to express their joy and devotion, and is rendered by young people of the many nationalities represented in the Hull-House neighborhood. Possibly it is the spirit of Christmas, possibly it is the influence of music which holds together the souls of these people, but certain it is that, although most of the songs are of a religious character, Russian and Polish Jewish children participate with the consent of their parents.

An eminent author who has made a study of immigrants, especially of the Jews, said after he had listened to one of those concerts: “It is wonderful to see people, who in Russia would have died rather than speak the name of Christ, here singing these dongs, and their families in the audience enjoying this music.” Nobody who knows the principles of Hull-House will accuse us of trying to influence the religious convictions of our friends; but the fact that all these people are united in the true spirit of Christmas may perhaps be a genuine expression of “Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men.”

This Christmas Carol was composed by one of the older pupils in the Music School, and, given for the first time at one of these concerts, was sung by a group of his younger brothers and sisters.

After the concert the children, with their families, take supper together in a spacious room lighted only by the tapers of a large Christmas tree. This “Music-School Tree” is always the same and unlike any of the others which flourish at Hull-House. It is a large fir tree which reaches from floor to ceiling and is fastened to a secure stand. To the top is tied a star made of silver tinsel wound around a frame of strong wire. Many “icicles” of glass are attached to conspicuous branches, and a large number of candle-holders are made of unpainted tin. Then we carefully spread soft fluffy asbestos or a new German non-combustible cotton over all the thicker and finer branches to make them look as if they were snow-covered. Twelve packages of plain silver-tinsel thread are also put on, starting at the top so that the tinsel covers the tree like a silver veil. The threads are laid on the branches almost singly and must not be in the least tangled. White candles are placed in the holders and holly is laid on the floor around the tree. After the candles have been lighted–beginning at the top–all lights in the room are turned out. There it stands in wonderful, mysterious, silent beauty, like the Spirit of Christmas, glittering softly in green, white and silver.

This perhaps is the climax of our Christmas celebration, although the holiday week is full of all sorts of jollifications, ending with the “Old Settlers” party on New Year’s Day.

Click here for a transcription of the entire article and the original image, mounted by the wonderful Urban Experience in Chicago site.

October 23, 2015October 14, 2025

Hull House Haunting

As Halloween nears, we turn to the more spirited side of the Hull House that Jane Addams started. The House itself, which was built by Charles Hull in 1856, was in an area of Chicago that was extremely fashionable before the Great Fire in 1871. After the Great Fire, the wealthy of the area left and moved to other areas, leaving the West Side of Chicago to be turned into a place for the poorest of the poor, from prostitutes to immigrants. It was these people that Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr wanted to reach out to. They therefore rented the house…and made a surprising discovery. The house was haunted by Charles Hull’s late wife.

Addams and Starr were not the first inhabitants of the Hull House to meet the late Mrs. Hull. The house had been rented out before and the tenants saw her ghostly figure in the room that had been hers. Terrified, they attempted to combat it by placing a pitcher of water over the threshold, believing that spirits could not get over the running water.

Jane Addams, ca. 1907 (Library of Congress)

Addams slept originally in the room where Mrs. Hull died, which was where her spirit allegedly remained. While there, she saw Mrs. Hull a few times and, though Addams determined that she seemed to mean no harm, eventually decided to move into another room. They did not completely close off the room, however, and sometimes had guests stay in there. Some of these guests also saw Mrs. Hull’s spirit. Today, the house is included on Ghost Tours in Chicago and has a reputation as one of the most haunted places in Chicago, despite the relatively benign nature of the ghost.

In addition to the rather less frightening ghost of Mrs. Hull, there was the rumor of a Devil Baby ensconced in the attic of the Hull House. Though Jane Addams continually denied the existence of such a disfigured child hidden away in the attic, the legend persisted and even grew before it eventually died down, though it never vanished completely. Jane Addams herself took to The Atlantic in 1916 to explain the truth of the matter. In that article, she explores not just the legend of the Devil Baby, but why that story held the minds of the women that she serviced.

Headline from the Muskogee Times-Democrat, June 16, 1914.

The Devil Baby has two different versions, one for the Italian Catholics and one for the Jews, though they were essentially the same. In both versions, there is an innocent bride whose husband is the villain and causes their child to be born with horns and a tail- a Devil Baby. In some versions, the baby can also spout profanity within a few months. All stories, however, conclude with the distraught mother bringing the baby to the Hull House, where a mystified Jane Addams locked it in the attic because she had no idea what to do with it.

This story, of course, was fervently denied by Addams and the rest of the Hull House staff. They insisted that the first time they ever heard the story was when two women appeared at the doorstep, wanting to see the Devil Baby for themselves. Though they were quickly turned away, they were just the first in a steady stream of visitors, seeking to see this mysterious child. Though the child never existed, the legends of it persisted, and in many ways are similar to other urban legends, such as the Jersey Devil.

So why do these kinds of stories hold the imaginations of the people, even today? Jane Addams’ theory was simply that they were a form of warning tale. Abuse was exceptionally prevalent in this period, particularly domestic abuse of wives by their husbands. Thus, the story of the Devil Baby is a morality tale of what can happen when the man of the household fails to be faithful and appropriately religious and therefore disrespects his wife and family. Though there was no actual Devil Baby caused by a cruel father, the hope that it gave the women that it would keep the menfolk in line to hear of the potential consequences of their actions was an important aspect of Jane Addams’ work and this rumor helped her determine where the women needed the most help.

Whether the hauntings of Hull House were real or not, they are certainly a rich part of the house’s legacy and the importance of the house in the history of Chicago.

–Meg Szydlik, Editorial Assistant

Sources:

Jane Addams, “The Devil-Baby at Hull House,” The Atlantic, Oct. 1916.

Weird and Haunted Chicago: A guide to Ghosts, Local Legends, and Unsolved, Mysteries of the Windy City.

“Social Settlement as Contested Space: Addams’ Personal Faith versus her Public Uses of Religion,” in Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and its Neighborhood, 1889-1963.

“Jane Addams and the Legends of Hull-House,” Chicago’s Haunt Detective.

October 15, 2015July 23, 2026

Jane Addams’s “Cultural Fables”: Neighbors’ Narratives as Political Rhetoric in Progressive-Era America.

This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz, and delivered at the Oral History Association meeting in Tampa, FL on October 15, 2015.

This paper looks at how Jane Addams’s stories about her neighbors, what I am calling her “Cultural Fables,” are linked to the radical branch of the oral history tradition in American culture. I have no documentation that there are direct causal links. However, many decades after her death in 1935, a new interest in Jane Addams’s writings and her use of social justice stories of her neighbors resonated with a new breed of young historians. They were dedicated to “history from the bottom up,” including investigators who had begun to do oral histories to document the struggles of “ordinary” people.[1] Not only were Addams’s books filled with stories about workers and immigrants who had been voiceless, but her approach to reform linked social knowledge and advocacy in direct and unapologetic ways. So, in the use of narratives (as an effort to bring her subjects into direct dialogue), and in her social activist agenda, I argue that Jane Addams is an example of a literary and historical tradition that is related to the radical oral history tradition. Acknowledging these roots offers perspective and historical context for an exploration of the methodologies, claims, and goals of current work.

Story telling was significant for Jane Addams. Her international success, one can argue, was in large part because of her skill as a writer, and what was special about her talent was her gift for interposing stories while advancing social policy.[2] Katherine Joslin writes that Addams’s books “are dialogic in nature, have much in common with novels” and “brought voices from . . . [the] street into conversations with the [reformers’] voices from Hull-House.”[3]

How Addams came upon the idea to use stories about her immigrant neighbors to write about the most profound social issues of her day may be simply an outcome of her own saturation in the novels and literature that she gobbled up in her youth. The whole canon of Western tradition–biblical, mythological, and poetic– had made an enormous impression on her.

The “cultural fables” were meant to be understood as real, not fictional accounts, however– because they embodied a deeper truth.[4] So convincing are these cultural fables that many have taken these stories to be historical accounts.[5]

Here is an example of how Addams wrote about the conditions of single working mothers and the crisis of childcare at the turn of the 20th Century. Addams tells us the story of a little boy who came to the Hull-House nursery “wrapped up in his mother’s shawl, [who] always had his hair filled with the down and small feathers from the feather brush factory where she worked” and because of this, the children called him “Goosie.”[6]

“One March morning,” Addams writes, “Goosie’s mother was hanging out the washing on a shed roof at six o’clock, doing it thus early before she left for the factory. Five-year-old Goosie was trotting at her heels handing her clothespins, when he was suddenly blown off the roof by the high wind into the alley below. His neck was broken by the fall and as he lay piteous and limp on a pile of frozen refuse, his mother cheerily called him to “climb up again,” so confident do overworked mothers become that their children cannot get hurt.”

Then Addams continues: “After the funeral, as the poor mother sat in the nursery postponing the moment when she must go back to her empty rooms, I asked her, in a futile effort to be of comfort, if there was anything more we could do for her. The overworked, sorrow stricken woman looked up and replied, ‘If you could give me my wages for to-morrow, I would not go to work in the factory at all. I would like to stay at home all day and hold the baby. Goosie was always asking me to take him and I never had any time.'”

Addams then explained: “This statement revealed the condition of many nursery mothers who are obliged to forego the joys and solaces which belong to even the most poverty-stricken. The long hours of factory labor necessary for earning the support of a child leave no time for the tender care and caressing which may enrich the life of the most piteous baby.”[7]

For the middle classes and rich in America, and for many of the country’s leading intellectuals[8], Addams became the interpreter of the working class and immigrant populations allowing her to engage in a difficult portrayal of controversial and often divisive social questions such as poverty and labor conflict. All make a moral point and, in many cases, illustrate that the subject of the fable has experienced a change of heart, a new attitude or understanding of the world. There is the clear suggestion that the reader, too, can come to a new and evolved ethical position. In political terms, they have become Progressive and their politics have been socialized.[9]

Addams’s early descriptions of Italian immigrant mothers illustrated her argument that public schools should become centers to socialize the children of immigrants.[10] Addams had posited a primitive or socially isolated immigrant mother whose love of her children could not overcome her disabilities to be a constructive force for their socialization into American society. Immigrant families had “no social life in any structural form, and can supply none to the child”[11] she told educators. The Italian mother who feeds her infant bread dipped in wine, the Italian immigrant woman who is shocked to see fresh roses on display at Hull-House because for six years she has not experienced more than her own two-block stretch of neighborhood, have become Addams’s political narrative.[12]

So rich and complex is Addams’s woven tapestry, that it is difficult for the reader to imagine that there are untold stories which might complicate and upset the weave or question the wisdom or the politics. Yet numerous Italian families who lived in the congested “slum” near Hull-House included Italian women who were proprietors of store front groceries and community leaders.[13] Modern oral histories of neighborhood people capturing intergenerational stories illustrate positive themes of economic and social mobility and the encouragement of Italian girls to achieve education and careers.[14]

Addams was aware of the thin line between exploiting the misery of the poor and using stories to promote constructive advocacy for the cause of social reform. “Perhaps Nothing is More Unfair than to know the poor only during a crisis,” she wrote. “I remember one family in which the father had been out of work for this same winter, most of the furniture had been pawned, and as the worn-out shoes could not be replaced the children could not go to school and could scarcely leave the house. The mother was ill and barely able to come for the supplies and medicines.” The second half of the story becomes very important: “She came to see me two years afterward to invite me to Sunday supper in the little home which had been completely restored,” Addams recounts, ” and she gave as one reason for the invitation that she couldn’t bear to have me remember them as they had been during that one winter, which she insisted had been unique in her twelve years of married life. She said quite simply that it was as if she had met me, not as I am ordinarily, but as I should appear during a siege of illness, when I might be misshapen with rheumatism or present a face distorted by neuralgic pain; that it wasn’t fair to judge poor people that way. She perhaps unconsciously illustrated the difference between the relief-station relation to the poor and the settlement relation to its neighbors, the latter wishing to know them through all the varying conditions of life, to stand by when they are in distress, but by no means to drop intercourse with them when normal prosperity had returned and enables the relation to become more social and free from the economic disturbance.”[15]

Addams was committed to the proposition that poverty did not define her neighbors. Telling stories about them, such as the Goosie fable, sought to establish a truth about the humanity of the bereaved mother. Addams assumed that readers would follow her argument and understand that the best way to redress such human tragedies was to reform the wage labor system, provide dependent mothers with adequate pensions to remain at home with young children, and so forth. Photographers like Lewis Hine and investigative journalists followed a similar logic. What distinguished Addams was her claim that the people she was telling stories about were not passing frames in a camera’s eye, or background for a newspaper story. They were the stories of her neighbors with whom she had deeper, sustained relationships and in an almost mystical way, by the end of the story telling, the cultural fable is as much Addams’s story as it is her neighbor’s.

Addams comes closest to melding herself with her neighbors, ironically, with the ” Devil Baby story.”[16] For a period of six weeks in the fall of 1913, thousands of people appeared at Hull-House demanding to see a “Devil Baby” who was rumored to be hidden in the settlement’s living quarters. Each immigrant group had its own version of the tale. The Italian version involved an atheist husband who tells his pregnant wife that he would rather have the devil in his house than her religious pictures on the wall. His wish is granted when the baby turns out to be the devil himself. In the Jewish version the devil appears as the seventh child of a husband who had threatened his wife not to add another daughter to the six they already had. The commotion caused by this event was even reported in the city’s newspapers. Neighbors insisted that the “Devil Baby” had been brought to Hull-House where the resident ladies were keeping it and no amount of insistence on the part of Addams that there was no such baby at Hull-House seemed to make any headway in quelling the rumor and ending the inquiries.

The “Devil Baby” story was a turning point in Addams’s understanding of her neighbors’ and her own relationship to memory, to custom and tradition, and to women’s coping mechanisms in the struggle of survival. Addams writes or talks about this story and the neighborhood incident that brought it to her attention in several venues–a sociological journal, an important speech to a woman’s club, in her 1916 book, The Long Road of Woman’s Memory, and finally, in 1930, with The Second Twenty Years At Hull-House. In the process of living with the story, as she had “lived” more than forty years with her neighbors, Addams had forged an approach to life that had started with the shape and tradition of high Western culture; she had “collected” her neighbors’ superstitious tales as the folk culture she believed must be interwoven with the Western canon, and thus transmuted. This was not just a literary process. It was Addams’s journey toward self-discovery through the memories and stories of the immigrant women and their children.

The “Devil Baby” also became part of her narrative of Progressive politics and her explanation of the residual ancient myths and superstitions inhabiting space alongside modern progress. This, after all, had become the nature of her neighborhood as she and her social reform allies had introduced a world of modern ideas and institutions. Addams reasoned that the story had persisted because of its usefulness in “taming recalcitrant husbands and fathers”[17] and had “evolved in response to imperative needs of anxious wives and mothers.”[18]

Addams acknowledged the social usefulness of so-called “primitive” or isolated immigrant women, who cling to tradition yet, in her new understanding, can be seen as examples of self-advocacy and survival. “Only through words [in the Devil Baby tale] could they hope to arouse the generosity of strength,” Addams explained, “to secure a measure of pity for themselves and their children, so to protect the life they had produced.” Addams realized they had “embodied their memories in a literature of their own”[19] that had “something of social value . . . forced out of oppression through the centuries.”[20] Her mind was opened to the fact that “humble women are still establishing rules of conduct as best they may, to counteract the base temptations of a man’s world.”[21]

Addams shares the inspiration and motivation of radical oral history. She intended for us to know her working-class and immigrant neighbors in all their complexity and humanity. She attempted to treat her interactions and investigations along ethical guidelines, refusing to see her neighborhood as a sociological laboratory. Such clinical words as “clients” or “patients” or “interviewees” didn’t fit her idea of the transaction that was occurring. Her activities were framed in the language of domesticity and friendship and the stories were gathered informally and simply through the experiences of living alongside. And finally, Addams wrote about her neighbors narratively because she wanted her readers to understand the social reality of other peoples’ lives–people who lived world’s apart from the comfortable bourgeois lives in other parts of the city. She wanted to use the stories to advocate for social change. The impulse to collect the voices of the silenced or marginalized is strong in the radical branch of modern oral history. Addams’s interest in the stories of her immigrant neighbors resembles these values and goals, if not the actual literary structure of modern oral histories.

In conclusion, using the stories of her neighbors, Addams’s melding her political story with them was an innovative, if imperfect, beginning to documenting their lives. As a form of writing, her books represent Addams’s effort to democratize the American narrative. In her challenge to the hegemonic American narrative of her day, we find the boy Goosie and his mother, and other neighbors, mostly unnamed, in the pages of Twenty Years At Hull-House. Yet the narrative remains in Addams’s voice as she tells her neighbors’ stories through the lens of the social reformer as interpreter.

[1] The literature on the “new social history” is voluminous. The explosion of new scholarship in women’s, labor, African American, and ethnic histories is well known. The landscape today is vastly different although the outcomes for revising the Master Narrative of American history have been slower in happening, and history from the top down has had a stronger grip. At the same time we have to acknowledge the difficulties of writing the new synthesis that has plagued the subspecialties. In terms of the vast field of oral history, such projects as Elizabeth Balanoff’s Oral History Project in Labor History, 1970-, Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois, is an example of the currents in the field. My personal experience using Balanoff’s collection is instructive: without this collection my biographical project, which resulted in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Indiana University Press, 2001) would have faltered in its efforts to “discover” and include labor women activists of and working-class women of color from the Great Depression thru the 1950s. The documentation of lives of pioneering women in the steel industry, the laundry unions, the Chicago Federation of Labor were known to our project almost entirely as a result of Balanoff’s efforts. Coming from a steel worker union family, “Betty” Balanoff wrote a breakthrough dissertation, “A History of the Black Community of Gary, Indiana, 1906-1940” (Ph.D. diss. U. of Chicago, 1974) and oral histories were part of her work. I would be remiss in not mentioning Studs Terkel and his working-class oral interviews that became Division Street (1968), Hard Times interviews (1971) and Working (1974).

[2] Historian Victoria Brown correctly acknowledges that an important “key to understanding Jane Addams’s reform career lies in recognizing that she was the most effective and prolific writer of her generation of reformers.” Victoria Bissell Brown, “Jane Addams,” in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001): 14.

[3] Katherine Joslin, Jane Addams A Writer’s Life (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 16.

[4] Addams’s most successful book, Twenty Years at Hull-House, which has never been out of print since its publication in 1910, has been analyzed by scholars interested in the fictive aspects of this autobiography. See: Rima Lunin Schultz, “Questions and Comments on Reading Twenty Years at Hull-House: How Two Addams Biographers View Twenty Years” in Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods 1889-1963, Rima Lunin Schultz, editor, http://tigger.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/urbanexp/main.cgi?file=new/show_doc.ptt&doc=902&chap=137.

[5] Addams, who often demonstrates a modern sensibility about the grey areas of narrative, was aware and careful to note in her most widely read work, Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes, that she was not writing an historical account: “It has been hard to determine what incidents and experiences should be selected for recital,” Addams explained. “I have found,” she goes on, “that I might give an accurate report of each isolated event and yet give a totally misleading impression of the whole, solely by the selection of the incidents.” [italics added] Jane Addams, Twenty Years At Hull-House, vii.

[6] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan Co., 1910), 173-175.

[7] Jane Addams, “Problems of Poverty,” Chapter 8 in Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1910). 173-175.

[8] Middle-class Protestants who flocked to Chautauqua lectures are a representative group who saw Addams as the great interpreter. When Twenty Years came out, a detailed guide to the book was printed in the society’s house organ, The Chautauquan, and members were encouraged to form study groups. These were her people: American born, white, liberal Protestant, middle-class, educated, citizens ready to be enlightened in the morally righteous causes of progressivism. In 1905 Addams, with hopes of shaping civic consciousness to support progressive educational reforms, and trusting in the basic good will of educated, liberal Protestants, told her Chautauqua audience that they were “the ones who will most readily understand this great demand [to understand working class and immigrant children’s needs] which is coming to us adult Americans that they will come to understand the peoples from all parts of the world and to find out what it is that they have that will be of benefit to us. . . until we are all ashamed of ourselves when we are separated by differences of language or differences of dress and manner, or when we are content to go along day by day and say no word of fellowship.” Jane Addams, “Work and Play as Factors in Education,” The Chautauquan, A Weekly Newsmagazine; Nov. 1905; 42, 3; American Periodicals Series Online, pg. 251. John Dewey and William James were just two of the many intellectuals at the time who looked to Addams for guidance when it came to understanding “the people” in the neighborhoods. William James wrote Addams after reading her Newer Ideals of Peace, a badly named book that actually delves into the politics and social relations of her immigrant neighborhood as the basis for her ideas on national and global issues: “I am just back from a fortnight in New York, where, after in the intervals of “energizing” in the rhythm of that active city (or trying to), I soothed myself by the perusal of your book. I find it hard to express the good it has done me in opening new points of view and [end 5-0063]annihilating old ones. New perspectives of hope! I don’t care about this detail or that—it is the new setting of questions. Yours is a deeply original mind, and all so quiet and harmless! yet revolutionary in the extreme, and I should suspect that this very work would act as a ferment thru long years to come. I read precious little sociological literature, and [end 5-0064] my opinions in that field are worth nothing—but I am willing to bet on you. William James to Jane Addams, Cambridge, MA, Feb. 12, 1907, Swarthmore College Peace Collection Jane Addams Papers Series 1, Jane Addams Papers Microfilm Reel 5-0063-0066.

[9] Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1994).

[10] The School as a Social Center is a major contribution of reformers in the Progressive Era. Jane Addams, “Educational Methods,” Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902; Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002): 80-97 (2002 edition); John Dewey, “The School as Social Center,” National Education Association Proceedings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902): 373-83.

John Dewey, “The School as Social Center,” National Education Association Proceedings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902): 373-83; Clarence Arthur Perry, “School Center History in Chicago: Some Beginnings and Their Significance,” The Journal of Social Forces 3 (January 1925): 291-93. For a different “take” on public versus parochial schools, see: Rima Lunin Schultz, “Jesuits, Catholic Women Religious and Public School “Secularists”: Competing Visions For Educating Immigrant Catholics in Jane Addams’s Progressive Era Chicago, 1890-1925,” in Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814-2014, edited by Kyle Roberts and Stephen Schloesser (Leiden: Brill Publishing, forthcoming 2016).

[11] 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.

[12] These are gathered from Twenty Years at Hull-House and there are others of a similar vein, 102; 110-111; 253-255. Although Irish and Jewish immigrant women have found their “voices,” the revisionist histories about Italians are more recent. See: Jennifer Guglielmo, “Donne Ribelli: Recovering the History of Italian Women’s Radicalism in the United States,” 113, in The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism edited by Philip V. Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (Westport, Conn. & London: Praeger , 2003); Donna Gabaccia, editor, Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States (Westport, Conn. & London: Praeger, 1992).

[13] Stephen Giovangelo, nephew of community activist Florence Giovangelo Scala, donated photos and other memorabilia for my research. A photo of his great grandmother behind the counter of her grocery store: “Here’s a terrific one of my GREAT grandmother, Rose Napolitano (mother’s side) behind the counter of her Chicago west side grocery store. My mother Rose (named after her grandmother) is the baby in the arms of the woman, my [maternal] grandmother, Mary [nee Napolitano] Marinello, who grew up on Miller Street. She was the first American born of the family, in the 800 block of South Miller Street, about half a block from our old family building. She said half the buildings back then (ours was there when she was little) had a small barn with a horse and a few laying-chickens in a coop. Her father had one of those behind the house, Grandma said and he called the horse ‘Maria.”

[14] Perhaps it is a function of “selection”–the neighbors who faired well in life tend to become available for oral interviews. The Hull-House Oral History Collection has more than 200 interviews. The majority tell stories of early poverty, experiences of refinement and education at Hull-House, and trajectories of upward social mobility. See: Sadie Garland Dreikurs Oral Interview transcript, OH-024; Eleanor Carroll Farwell Oral History transcript, OH-052; Esperanza and James McNeilly Oral Interview transcript, OH-093; Dorothy Sigel Oral Interview transcript, OH-071; Nicolette Malone Oral Interview transcript, OH-076; Mrs. Nate (Goldie Newman) Kahn Oral Interview transcript, OH-073; Alex Elson Oral Interview transcript, OH-074. Francine Tarsitano Underdown Oral Interview Transcript OH-114, Hull-House Oral Interviews, Spec. Collections, Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; Barbara Dobschuetz, “Research Notes From Tarsitano Family Interviews,” Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhood Project, 2002-2005, Hull-House Museum, University of Illinois at Chicago.

[15] “Jane Addams’s Own Story of Her Work: How the Work at Hull-House Has Grown,” The Ladies Home Journal 23 (May 1906): 11-12, 48.

[16] An interesting essay on The Long Road of Woman’s Memory are: Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Introduction to the Illinois Edition,” The Long Road of Woman’s Memory by Jane Addams (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

[17] Jane Addams, The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 17.

[18] The Long Road, 18.

[19] The Long Road, 19.

[20] The Long Road, 55.

[21] The Long Road, 19.

October 18, 2014July 27, 2026

Jane Addams’s Dilemma: American Catholic Education in the Progressive Era, 1890-1925

This post was presented by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Crossings and Dwellings Conference, Loyola University Chicago, on October 18, 2024.

Historian Carol Coburn’s keynote address Thursday evening has deepened our understanding of the crucial role Catholic sisters have played in building and shaping Catholic culture and American life over the last 200 years. You don’t have to look far for examples: right around the corner at the Loyola Museum of Art in the “Crossings and Dwellings” exhibit is visual evidence of the contributions of the Religious of the Sacred Heart and the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs) to the social infrastructure of Chicago and to the development of an American Catholic middle class. Many of the BVMs were immigrants themselves or the daughters of immigrants and they understood that Catholic schools could play a central role in shaping American democratic life. Their schools gained a reputation for excellence and grew steadily, enrolling more than 5,000 students in Chicago by the time of the 1893 World’s Fair. At the turn of the 20th Century, BVMs were in the vanguard among American Catholic educators in planning high schools and colleges for the great industrial cities where working-class Catholic immigrants had settled. St. Mary High School on Chicago’s Near West Side, followed by The Immaculata on the city’s North Side, were modern central high schools where Catholic girls from across the metropolitan area were educated for academic, religious, and commercial careers. The BVM vision of a comprehensive educational system for women took physical shape in 1930 with the opening of Mundelein College. Not only did the Art Deco skyscraper reflect a modern sensibility—with a curriculum to match—but the commuter college provided opportunities for a new generation of American-born Catholics.

In the last fifty years historians have documented the contributions of American women to the social, cultural, political, and economic life of the nation in the transformative years of nation-building at the turn of the 20^th Century. We now know that a robust women’s political culture existed decades before women won the vote and there is extensive scholarship describing and critiquing the contributions of women to the formation of the modern welfare state. Jane Addams is one of the well-studied women in this great narrative of American women’s social history and while progress has been made, historians of gender and women’s history continue to grapple with the problem of integrating gender and women’s history into the master narrative.

To complicate our work, I want to introduce the problem of where American women’s Catholic history fits into American women’s history, and, implicitly, where it fits into the national narrative, a narrative that has been dominated for the past two hundred year or more, by the Protestant worldview and has been told largely through Protestant male voices. This morning I am using Jane Addams and her relationship to Catholics to examine this historiographic problem. Addams was a self-proclaimed democratic cosmopolitan who regarded her Hull-House settlement as a positive force to uplift her immigrant neighbors but, like many middle class Protestants, she regarded their neighborhood as a slum, devoid of the leadership necessary to form a higher life for men, women, and children. In London, the social settlement was a recent effort by an Anglican priest and his wife and a group of Oxford University graduates to overcome the widening gap between the people who ran English society and the masses who lived and worked separated from culture and privilege. Addams regarded Toynbee Hall, and her own work, as an outgrowth of a humanitarian impulse in a new generation of educated Protestants who found the traditional approaches of their denominational churches inadequate to the problems of industrial life. It was a kind of missionary endeavor of a new, non-sectarian sort. Addams understood that the English model didn’t fit the needs and conditions in American cities and one of the most obvious differences was that in Chicago, where she and Ellen Gates Starr “settled” in 1889, the population was overwhelmingly immigrant and Catholic.

My revisionist work on Jane Addams and Hull-House has led me to reconsider the contributions of Catholic sisters and to question why Hull-House continues to be regarded as the norm against which Catholic institutions are compared. Neither Addams nor historians writing about her acknowledge that Catholic parishes and schools functioned as social centers that performed many of the same functions as the settlement. On the whole, Addams scholars have not been terribly concerned that she interpreted urban problems without any reference to the parish system and the work of Catholic Sisters teaching in the Hull-House neighborhood. Far from critiquing Addams’ basic sociological views on the subject of Catholic immigrants and their adjustment to American life, the opposite has occurred. The trend in Addams scholarship has been to argue for her inclusion as a major American sociologist and as a pragmatic philosopher.

On the other hand there has been a new effort to understand the historiographic problem of the Protestant bias in the writing of American history, to which I applaud. Until we are able to de-center the implicit Protestant hegemonic view of American history we will continue to have problems integrating new knowledge of Catholics in American history, and, more pointedly, we will continue to write the narrative of Addams and Hull-House without acknowledging the dilemma she had in her work with Catholics.

We must carefully distinguish Addams’s positive attitudes toward immigrants and her sympathetic concern for their rights and welfare from her attitudes about the serious issue of religious pluralism in democracy. Simply put, Addams loved the people but disliked and distrusted their churches, their priests, their schools and the Sister-teachers who ran them. When we study her evaluation of immigrants we have to understand this dimension of her deeply rooted world-view.

The paradox of Addams’s thinking about her immigrant neighbors is most apparent in her agenda for the educational needs of foreign-born children and children born in the United States of immigrant parents. For Addams and other social feminists and progressive reformers the public schools were the only sure route to a harmonious and effective democracy. Immigrants and their children could be good citizens if they didn’t go to parochial schools. More than this, Addams and her colleagues called for reform of the public schools to address the special needs of these immigrant children.

The Roman Catholic teaching sisters, the BVMs and the Jesuits who taught young men in St. Ignatius College, just a few blocks from Hull-House, believed they could establish a system of Catholic schools that would promote a wholesome Americanism as well as traditional Catholic religious values. They intended for their graduates to enrich the national civic life not imperil it. They also had definite ideas about the kind of instruction and curriculum their students required.

The Hull-House settlement and the Holy Family parish schools competed for control of the education of the neighborhood children. It was a political battle that was waged in the City Council, on the School Board of the Chicago Public Schools, at the State level where compulsory education legislation was debated, and “on the ground” in the competition in the neighborhoods for students. It was self-conscious, on both sides. Jesuit priests begged the BVMs to open their schools in August before the public schools. There was a rush to keep up with the Catholic student population and make certain no families were kept from placing their children in parochial schools. Public school policy was shaped in the context of this battle royal; Catholics as a beleaguered minority shaped their American church identity and their individual identities in the heat of the discourse over the schools.

The debate over the role of the State in the education of children in a democracy that has many cultures, races, and ethnicities attending a variety of school systems was important at the turn of the 20th Century and continues to be important in the 21st Century. If we have time in the Q & A section this morning, it might be interesting to think about how inner-city Catholic schools are viewed in our present education crisis and how they were viewed about one hundred and twenty years ago! Today and yesterday the relationship of education to citizenship and to the stability and success of the economy and the social system elevates debates about pedagogy, social control, and curricula choices to the highest levels of social policy.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, non-Catholics saw the public schools as “good schools” and the parochial schools as “bad schools.” This certainly was the attitude of Jane Addams and the reformers in the Hull-House circle. This fits in with Tracy Fessenden’s interesting analysis of Protestantism and Catholicism in American culture and literature. Fessenden describes how anti-Catholic Protestants created a myth of good religion and bad religion that they masked with notions of secularism in public life. Good religion is associated with freedom and enlightenment, bad religion with coercion and constraint, and this scheme, Fessenden says, has become implicit in the “progress narrative of democracy.”[1] Now Catholics also had ideas about good and bad religion. This was the whole point about avoiding the public schools, which Catholics continued to believe were really a cover for protestantizing efforts. When Hull-House was accused by one of the principals at St. Mary High School as not being a “Christian institution,” this was really a statement about the settlement house’s anti-Catholic (and implicitly pro-Protestant) approach.

Most troubling to me as an historian is that Addams fails to give a fair accounting of the religious and educational institutions in the neighborhood after claiming that only through the experience of living in the neighborhood could educated Americans like herself uplift the people in these working class and immigrant districts. By 1892, twelve Catholic schools existed in the Hull-House neighborhood.[2] I have found no documentation that she approached these institutions, to which so many of the children and youth who participate in the settlement house, were enrolled, with any openness or interest even as she had pledged herself to engage with the common lot of people. The families in her neighborhood, including many who sent their children to Hull-House programs after school and in the summer, also enrolled their sons and daughters in the Catholic school system. Addams knew these children and could see their talents and their maturation, even with the influence of the religious sisters and the priests. And the teaching sisters were well aware of the influence of Hull-House. The children knew there was a conflict. Francine Tarsitano, a 1954 graduate of St. Mary High School, identified this tension when she recounted the disapproval her BVM teachers expressed when she came to school wearing a special Hull-House club jacket:

Well, we were called into the principal’s office about these jackets. “Where is this club? What is this club?” “This is a Hull-House club.” We were so proud to say that, that it was from Hull-House. She said, “You cannot wear those jackets here. And we advise you not to go to Hull-House anymore because it is not a Christian organization.” So I went home and I told my mother and father that and they said, “A Christian organization. We never even thought of it as that.” But you know, my father went to . . . [St. Mary’s]and said, “They’re going to Hull-House. She is going to Hull-House. They’ve only done good things for our family.” Well we were never allowed to wear the jackets anymore, that was it. Couldn’t wear it to St. Mary’s. [3]

For Addams, who affixed a Chi-Rho Cross to her bodice, her work at Hull-House was religious[4]; 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. In this way she envisioned Hull-House as a “cathedral of humanity,” a place where people of all religious persuasions could learn about each other and engage in a kind of civic or democratic fellowship. Did this mean that she resolved to exclude religious ideas from Hull-House? Not really. In a letter to a college settlement colleague, Addams spoke candidly: “We find each year that it is more possible to discuss frankly religious problems and differences, because our neighbors have constantly less fear that we will proselyte them.”[5] Frannie Tarsitano’s father, the son of Italian immigrants, was comfortable sending his children to Hull-House where they had “done good things for the family.”

The Hull-House approach to Catholic schools really begins before Addams located her new experiment in the Nineteenth Ward, otherwise known as Holy Family parish. She was already convinced that immigrants needed to attend public schools and was pleased when her new friend and guide to Italian neighborhoods, Alessandro Maestro Valerio, reported to her that he had in three months time “sent five hundred Italian children to [public] school.” [6] Addams shared Valerio’s goal to place as many Italian children in public schools as possible; he, like the liberal Protestant social feminists who worked with Addams on school reform, were saving children from the dangers of indoctrination in papal-controlled classrooms. This fear by the hegemonic Protestant culture of Catholic indoctrination in the formation of new citizens was so strong that for the Hull-House residents, imbued with these ideas, children in the elementary parochial schools could not be counted as properly “schooled”; this is indicated in the famous Hull-House Maps & Papers volume published in 1895. Children of immigrants who attended parochial schools, even though they were born in the United States and most likely were English speaking, were counted in the Nationalities Maps along with their parents as foreigners.

The campaign for more public schools in the Nineteenth Ward was led by the Hull-House reformers who claimed that there were 5,000 children in need of seats in new classrooms and demanded the board of education begin construction immediately. This happened to be the exact number of children enrolled in the Catholic elementary schools taught by the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs).[7] In the Hull-House view, American born children of immigrants who had not been influenced by the public schools were more truly designated “second-generation immigrants than first- generation Americans.”[8]

In 1897, Jane Addams, addressing the influential National Educational Association (NEA) on the needs of foreign-born children, or the American-born children of immigrants, explained that their families had “no social life in any structural form, and can supply none to the child.”[9] Addams is not making a derogatory comment about immigrants, who she asserts have very strong family values and love their children very much. Rather, she is expressing a sociological concept. For John Dewey, Chicago educator and superintendent of schools Ella Flagg Young, Addams and others in the progressive education movement, schools had to become social centers to supply the kind of guidance, training, and information that immigrant families were unable to provide. What the Hull-House maps demonstrate is the lack of public schools in the thirty or so blocks most distressed. In fact, a larger project of the Hull-House education reformers was to develop a decent public school system which did not yet exist, although Addams and others felt justified in their claims of its inherent superiority.

When Addams and Starr arrived in the Nineteenth Ward, the public schools had quite a bit of catching up to do. Addams and Starr ultimately chose a location for their settlement house that placed it at the intersection of two Catholic neighborhoods: to the east of Halsted Street there were about thirty city blocks of Chicago-style tenements, filled with immigrants of many nationalities, but predominantly Roman Catholic and Italian; here in the river wards, industrial and commercial businesses had mushroomed after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, and the housing stock accommodated increasing numbers of immigrant workers’ families. To the west (and including Hull-House itself) was a more prosperous neighborhood of more seasoned immigrants and of older residents, who Addams called “old settlers” and invited to the settlement house just as she invited the newcomers; in America for many generations, they had settled originally in the Near West Side when they, like Charles J. Hull, himself a real estate developer and evangelical Christian who built his homestead in 1856, imagined their homes would increase in value. Relatively undeveloped before the Civil War, this western edge of urban growth also attracted the Rev. Arnold J. Damen, S.J. who founded the Holy Family parish one year after Hull built his house. Addams coveted relationships with the neediest newest immigrants, the Italians, but the earliest efforts at Hull-House could not have gotten off the ground without the cooperation and engagement of the Irish Americans and “Old Settlers” who lived west of the settlement house.

Addams tended to underestimate the private associational strength of the Nineteenth Ward as if the developments at her settlement had no antecedent or parallel institutions with which to have social intercourse. This was particularly true of the underestimating of the Catholic strength and contribution.[10]

Had the Hull-House Maps & Papers project mapped the west side of the Nineteenth Ward, their narrative would have been dramatically different. We are not talking about immense space, just four or five blocks south, north, or west of Halsted Street and Hull-House would have given the neighborhood a different cast; it would have appeared “mixed” economically, with prosperous sections and brick residences, prosperous shops owned by immigrants, and lots of parochial schools and churches. Even the east side, the area mapped, was not all of one piece. Italian families who lived in this congested “slum” did not describe it that way. Francine Tarsitano, who told the story of her Hull-House jacket and the reaction of the BVM principal of St. Mary High School, was the youngest of a large Italian family. In 1901, her grandfather Leopoldo Tarsitano had settled in the east end of the Nineteenth Ward, on a block in the densely populated blocks earlier depicted in the Hull-House Maps. Leopoldo had been in the Italian Calvary before coming to the U. S. With his wife Rosario and son Gabriel, the Tarsitano’s lived for several years in a flat and Leopoldo worked as a grocery cart peddler but by 1907 the family had saved enough money to buy their own two-story store front brick home located just west of Holy Guardian Angel Church, an Italian parish. The store was on the first floor with the family living in the upper levels. The Tarsitano’s children and grandchildren all participated in the cultural and recreational opportunities offered by Hull-House, and they were devotees of the summer camp in Waukegan, a place where the daughters and sons of immigrants had the taste of life outside the neighborhood. They all attended Holy Guardian Angel Church, the parish schools and all of Leopoldo’s four granddaughters attended St. Mary High School; one became a physician, after graduating from Mundelein and Loyola University Medical School; two became school teachers, graduating from Northern Illinois University; and another sister married and had children but did not work outside the home; two grandsons attended St. Ignatius Jesuit High School and Our Lady of Pompeii High School, the former attending the University of Illinois briefly and ending up with a business career at the managerial level; the latter graduated from Loyola University, did graduate work at De Paul and at the University of Nebraska and became a political science professor at the College of Du Page.

One cannot judge whether the successes were mostly the result of the Hull-House connection or the extensive connection with Catholic schools. The more complete genealogy of the family indicates that the trends towards secularization in religion and society can be seen in the family as well as a lasting ethnic and culturally Catholic identity. There has been some intermarriage with non-Catholics and geographical mobility outside of the neighborhood, to be sure. There are also lasting remnants of the imprint of both Hull-House and the values of the teaching sisters.

The St. Mary High School experience was critically important for the Italian girls. They may not have fully understood how unique the experience was for the daughters of working class and immigrant families in the inner city. St. Mary’s had already drawn attention to itself when by 1915 social feminist Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of Chicago’s public schools voiced her concerns that there was a disproportionate numbers of Catholic high school grads enrolled in the Chicago Normal School. They had done so well on the entrance exams that Young was quoted as accusing the Catholics of running “cramming schools” to inflate their numbers entering the teachers’ college. There was anxiety about having too many Catholics from the catholic system end up as public school teachers. The issue had been brewing for some time. As early as 1903, Chicago school boards had openly strategized to limit the numbers of Catholics entering the teaching profession.[11] Superintendent of Schools Young, testifying in 1915 before a state committee investigating the Chicago School Board, “proposed a quota system by which the board would assign to each high school, both public and private , a fixed number of places in the Normal School. The Catholic newspaper the New World saw this as one more bigoted effort to limit the number of Catholic teachers in the public schools.”[12]

Such a proposal and others that followed in subsequent years were not successful, but they had a bearing on the Catholic school culture and the responses made by administrators in the Catholic high schools. [13]

This is a crucial part of the Catholic narrative of education that, unfortunately, is often not known in Catholic circles either. What provoked the Progressive social feminists was the great progress made by the BVM-run St. Mary High School for Girls. Located a stone’s throw from Hull-House, St. Mary High School was inaugurated at the height of the debate over urban education. Both the public system and the Catholic began the twentieth century with inadequate secondary institutions. At the turn of the century, when St. Mary’s was opened, secondary education remained an option for only a small segment of the population, whether American‑born or immigrant. St. Mary High School immediately identified college and careers in education as the major goal for its students, many of whom were the daughters of Irish immigrant women who had worked as laundresses, seamstresses, and domestics. BVM schools already had pioneered commercial programs for boys and girls in the 1890s,[14] so when commercial courses were introduced in 1902, they realistically prepared St. Mary’s students for the sector of the economy where jobs for women were expanding rapidly: the commercial office. Courses in bookkeeping, typing, business arithmetic, and soon, stenography, set the tone, with the goal for many graduates of attending a business college. [15]

The young women also studied laboratory sciences including physics and chemistry, and biological sciences including botany, zoology, and physiology. Music, drawing, manual training, and domestic science courses were also available. Textbooks used were the standard ones assigned in the public schools. Significantly, St. Mary’s was the first catholic girl’s high school to offer advanced academic work in the form of college extension courses taught by the Jesuits.[16]

“The object of the social settlement,’ Addams had outlined, ‘is the uplifting of the people—the word people representing the working classes—and this can best be accomplished by the poor acting as their own missionaries. No doubt the working people could be raised if they could be made to feel their power as citizens, because they are nearer to the needs of the poorest, while those who live in more comfortable parts of the town only hear of their needs remotely and know little practically about them.”[17] This statement by Addams paradoxically could have been written by the BVMs, simply changing “social settlements” to “Catholic schools.” The BVM sister-teachers came from immigrant backgrounds, some were the first women in their families to achieve literacy. They were, indeed, “the poor acting as their own missionaries.” The young women who were educated at St. Mary High School included many who came from the thirty or so blocks east of Halsted Street, mapped by the Hull-House residents in 1895 and designated as a “slum” neighborhood.

In innumerable cases, neighborhood boys and girls of talent and potential found Hull-House to be a school of opportunity and refinement, a bridge out of the neighborhood. In delving into their backgrounds, however, one can draw this surprising conclusion: many of the best and brightest stars who, as one of them put it, “bit the apple” of the settlement ideology about civic engagement, had been educated in the American Catholic parochial system. The Hull-House neighbors did not make an “either/or” choice but as children and later as young adults, many immigrants and their children and grandchildren found ways to benefit from religious, family, and social settlement networks in ways that were not imagined by either the social reformers or the Catholic hierarchy.

More than most mainline Protestants, Addams challenged her own biases and consciously pursued an openness to her immigrant neighbors. She opposed immigration restriction, and upheld the rights of aliens, including their freedom to dissent and criticize the government. She insisted that Hull-House not proselytize its Jewish and Roman Catholic neighbors, and she took pride in the Greek plays, the Italian and German social get-togethers, and the exhibits of old-world arts and crafts displayed in the Hull-House Labor Museum. She handled religious and cultural differences through the “performance” of religious pageantry without worship, religious art without prayer, and enactments of ethnic plays in the context of ethnically mixed audiences.[18] But the heavy-duty lifting educationally in the neighborhood remained in the hands of Catholic women, the teaching Sisters whose recent flight from poverty and illiteracy in their crossings gave their commitment to educate Catholics an urgency and a wisdom as they prepared the poor to “be their own missionaries.”

[1] Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007, 3.

[2] Historian Ellen Skerrett documents twelve Catholic schools in the Hull-House neighborhood in 1892: Convent Academy of the Sacred Heart, opened fall 1860, 485 [1258] W. Taylor Street ; A free school at the northwest corner of Taylor and Lytle streets for girls of Holy Family parish, 1860; additional buildings for the Sacred Heart Academy complex were constructed in 1864 and 1886; Holy Family Boys School, new building at 462 [approx. 1231] S. Morgan Street] opened 1865; St. Ignatius College, 413 [1076] W. 12^th Street [Roosevelt Road] opened 1870 (also enrolled young boys);St. Aloysius School, new building at 210 [631] W. Maxwell Street opened 1870; Holy Guardian Angel School, 168 [ 711] W. Forquer Street [Arthington Street] opened 1874;St. Joseph School, on W. 13^th Street near Loomis Street [1413 W. 13^th Street] opened 1876 ;St. Agnes School, 530 [approx. 1361] S. Morgan Street opened 1887; Ephpheta School for the Deaf, 409 [1100] S. May Street in operation by 1890 (see attached Tribune article on Eliza Allen Starr, March 16, 1890);St. Francis of Assisi School, new building at southwest corner of 12^th and Newberry Avenue opened 1884;Notre Dame [French] School, new building at Oregon [Flournoy] and Sibley Street [approx. 1338 W. Flournoy] opened 1885;St. Wenceslaus [Bohemian] School, new building at 185 [710] W. DeKoven Street opened in 1893. Sources: “Province of Chicago,” [1890 statistics compiled on the Archdiocese of Chicago], in James J. McGovern, Souvenir of the Silver Jubilee in the Episcopacy of His Grace The Most Rev. Patrick Augustine Feehan, Archbishop of Chicago, 1890 (Privately printed, 1891), 242-253; Brother Thomas M. Mulkerins, S.J., Holy Family Parish Chicago: Priests and People, ed. Joseph J. Thompson (Chicago: Universal Press, 1923); Rev. Msgr. Harry C. Koenig, ed., A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago 2 vols. (Chicago: the Archdiocese of Chicago, 1980).

[3] Francine Tarsitano Underdown Oral Interview Transcript OH-114, Hull-House Oral Interviews, Spec. Collections, Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

[4] The simple Chi-Rho Cross she prominently affixed to the collar of her dress can be seen in all the surviving photographs of Addams from the 1890s. It can be seen in the famous photo that has come to symbolize the determined young woman in her inaugural year as co-founder of Hull-House. The Chi-Rho Cross is visible in the 1892 charcoal drawing of Jane Addams by Alice Kellogg Tyler; it is in the famous portrait of Addams that appeared in New England Magazine, July 1898, in an article about Hull-House by Florence Kelley. It is visible in the portrait of Jane Addams that is on the cover of Victoria Bissell Brown’s new edition of Twenty Years at Hull-House (1999) and in the majestic photo portrait of Jane Addams seated in an elaborate Victorian chair that graces the front cover of Allen F. Davis’ American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams reprinted in 2000. Preparing to open a settlement house, Addams compared her intentions with the goals of the College Settlement Association in New York City: “I will inclose [sic] the circular of a similar thing in New York,” she wrote her sister. “We are modest enough to think that ours is better, is more distinctively Christian, and less Social Science.”

Jane Addams to Mary Catherine Addams Linn, March 13, 1889, Stephenson County Historical Society, in JAMC (reel 2-1043-1048), Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[5] Jane Addams to Katherine Coman, Chicago, Dec. 7, 1891, JAP Microfilm Reel 2-1283.

[6] Jane Addams to Mary Catherine Addams Linn, March 13, 1889, Stephenson County Historical Society, in JAMC (reel 2-1043-1048), Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[7] Rima Lunin Schultz, “Introduction,” 20, Hull-House Maps & Papers by the Residents of Hull-House (Urbana& Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007; reprint of original 1895 edition).

[8] Hull-House Maps & Papers, 59.

[9] 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.

[10]In “Hull House, Chicago: An Effort Toward Social Democracy,”Forum, October 1892, Jane Addams states that: “There are seven churches and two missions in the [Nineteenth] ward. All of these are small and somewhat struggling, save the large Catholic church [Holy Family] connected with the Jesuit College [St. Ignatius] on the south boundary of the ward and the French Catholic church [Notre Dame de Chicago] on the west boundary. There are but three out of these nine religious centres in which the service is habitually conducted in English.” The fact that English is only spoken in three out of the nine religious institutions is particularly upsetting to Addams. Addams also ignores the twelve Catholic schools in the Nineteenth Ward already established by 1892. “Province of Chicago,” [1890 statistics compiled on the Archdiocese of Chicago], in James J. McGovern, Souvenir of the Silver Jubilee in the Episcopacy of His Grace The Most Rev. Patrick Augustine Feehan, Archbishop of Chicago, 1890 (Privately printed, 1891), 242-253; Brother Thomas M. Mulkerins, S.J., Holy Family Parish Chicago: Priests and People, ed. Joseph J. Thompson (Chicago: Universal Press, 1923); Rev. Msgr. Harry C. Koenig, ed., A History of the Parishes of the Archdiocese of Chicago 2 vols. (Chicago: the Archdiocese of Chicago, 1980).

[11] Sanders, 28.

[12] Sanders, 28.

[13] “Bishop Muldoon Denies Charges of Mrs. Young,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 6, 1915, 13; P. L. B[lakely], “High Winds in Chicago,” America, Vol. 13, No. 21, Sept. 4, 1915, 525-526. It is perfectly clear that the Roman Catholic hierarchy was in competition with public schools in Chicago and did not wish them “success”; rallying around a common enemy stirred up support among Catholics to support their own schools. It was a strange predicament, however, since graduates of Catholic schools found employment in public schools and this was used to defend Catholic education.

[14] Callan, “The Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Their Schools in Chicago, 1867-1940,” Master’s Thesis Paper 607, Loyola University Chicago, 1941, Loyola eCommons, 60, establishes that The BVMs had experimented successfully with commercial programs.

[15] William H. Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century Oxford University Press, 1991, 68.

[16] St. Mary’s Herald, vol. I, no. 4, January 1931 includes historical material about the early years. St. Mary High School and Center for Learning papers, Richard J. Daley Library, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago. The BVMs had experimented successfully with commercial programs earlier:

[17] “Outlines A New Creed.” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 7, 1898, pg. 10.

[18] The role of Hull-House theater “in negotiating immigrant difference,” as Shannon Jackson puts it, is too large a topic to discuss in this paper. See Stuart J. Hecht, “Hull-House Theatre: An Analytical and Evaluative History,” Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1983; also: Elizabeth C. Barrows, “The Greek Play at Hull-House,” Commons (January 1904); Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (University of Michigan Press, 2000.) Such performances could also be seen as Addams’s efforts to simulate a “cathedral of humanity.” Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Unitarian minister and ally of Addams, who often invited the settlement leader to lecture from his pulpit, called her “the unordained minister of the unecclesiastical church of human helpfulness that is to be.” “Jenkin Lloyd Jones Memorial,” Unity, vol. LXXXII, No. 12 (November 28, 1918), 148.

November 13, 2010July 21, 2026

Reading History in Twenty Years at Hull-House: Jane Addams’s Narrative Choices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 21, 2009July 27, 2026

Charlotte Carr’s Hull-House: Labor Activism, Cultural Production, and Race Relations, 1937-42

This post was written by Rima Lunin Schulz as a chapter for an unpublished book about Hull-House after Jane Addams ca. 2007-2009.

Introduction

She was to remain at Hull-House for only five years, but Charlotte Carr led the famous settlement through an uncertain but innovative moment in its history. Carr was a big enough personality to shake things up at Hull-House following the death of Jane Addams, a figure whose posthumous “presence” loomed large. In 1937, Carr left her position as executive director of the New York City emergency relief bureau after having dealt successfully with New Deal critics and local community rebellion. She accepted the challenge to direct the famous settlement even though she did not come out of the settlement movement because Hull-House still offered her, as a pro-labor public administrator with an urgent message in support of workers, one of the most important “pulpits” to which an American woman could ascend.[1] Described in the press as a female John L. Lewis,[2] she brought her hard driving, take-charge style of leadership to Chicago to advocate workers’ rights.

Not since the days of the anti-sweatshop campaign in the 1890s led by Florence Kelley in coalition with female trade union leaders and clubwomen, and the period of Ellen Gates Starr’s labor activism with clothing workers and waitresses in the 1910s, had Hull-House been so actively engaged in a labor reform movement as the settlement was during the Carr years. Carr’s allies were New Dealers and labor leaders in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York. Kelley’s and Starr’s era was identified with the rise of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL); Carr’s New Deal is identified with the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the protests of the Unemployed Workers’ Councils. Not since its support of aldermanic reform candidates and Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential campaign on the Progressive Party ticket had Hull-House appeared as politically partisan as it became when Carr and her staff directly challenged hegemonic capitalism with workers’ education classes and with support for union organization in the neighborhood and in the settlement house itself.

Carr sought to bring together workers of all backgrounds, including African Americans who were becoming more numerous in the neighborhood, to assert their basic human rights to decent jobs with wages and hours that were negotiated not dictated by bosses. She opened Hull-House to African Americans in the neighborhood, she said, “not necessarily from the point of view of the racial question, but from the point of view of the lowest wage group.”[3] Rejecting cultural and arts and crafts activities that had dominated the Hull-House settlement and that stressed ethnic and racial identity, Carr was prepared to take up the challenge of the greatest historical movement of the mid to late twentieth century: the migration of African Americans from the South to the urban North. But she did so in the context of working-class organization and politics.

Hull-House during the Carr years was revitalized by the New Deal and by the involvement of its residents in the kind of cultural experimentation and political expression associated with the Popular Front and the Cultural Front.[4] There is much to learn from Hull-House’s experience during the New Deal. In framing the settlement’s activities in the context of new ideas generated by the Cultural Front nationwide, we also have an opportunity to see by comparison the original vision of the settlement idea as practiced at Hull-House.

Carr had to win the support of trustees and residents who had been devoted to Addams, especially Louise deKoven Bowen, president of the Hull-House Association, who had been a trustee and treasurer of Hull-House from 1903 and a great financial benefactor. Addams had a unique relationship with Bowen and the trustees and financial contributors (often one and the same) that supported her work. Unlike Carr, who was a career woman, Addams, one of the trustees’ class,[5] had established the settlement with her own funds, initially, and they backed her “experiment” and accepted her leadership. Since Addams was a volunteer who invested her own money in the settlement, she fit a model of womanly benevolence not one of professionalism. Addams, then, had a great deal of personal discretion and her initiatives and decisions about settlement policy were almost completely unchallenged by the close-knit group of trustees, a situation Carr could not duplicate.[6]

Creating a unified and spirited agenda was Carr’s first order of business. Even before Carr could venture out to the community and revitalize the settlement’s connection to the neighborhood, she had to bring together the staff and residents who were already at the settlement, including old-timers who had lived there for decades, with her new staff and residents who identified with her and her agenda. Although many of the older residents were badly bruised over the internal conflicts in Hull-House leadership that had precipitated the resignation of Adena Miller Rich,[7] whose short-lived and part-time efforts to sustain an original model of “head resident” failed, there was a desire on the part of the whole settlement community for change.

The change seemed instantaneous: many residents and staff exchanged their frustrations for a feeling of intense anticipation and excitement. “I cannot remember anymore what she[Carr] said [at first meeting with the residents] but I can remember how I felt,” Hull-House resident Donna Hodgman wrote. “I felt . . . that I could do—why anything at all. My mind was full of exclamation points.”[8] The infusion of new people Carr gathered included journalists and writers on the Left and Workers’ Education specialists. They were interested in the little magazines of the 1930s, experimental theater, and the cooperative movement. Many of them had been involved in New Deal programs elsewhere and seemed to be part of a nation-wide effort. Hull-House had participated in New Deal programs before, but Carr and her staff appeared to be connected in a fuller, more encompassing way.[9]

This chapter focuses on three areas of activities at the settlement in an effort to understand race, politics, and culture during the Carr years. The first area is that of race relations and community organization; the second is cultural production; and the third, political and labor activism.

These three areas of activity were interrelated, of course, since they stemmed from an overall approach to social change and to experimenting with expanding democracy’s social component that had been embraced by residents under Addams’s leadership but seemingly had lost direction at some point with the decline of the political edge that had characterized the settlement’s Progressive Era history. During the Carr years these areas of activity were brought into focus once more, but now defined by Carr and her staff in the context of New Deal social movements.

Race Relations and Community Organizing

In 1937 Carr immediately noted the absence of African Americans at Hull-House. Except for those houses established in black neighborhoods, the overwhelming majority of social settlements had been established in immigrant neighborhoods and had remained through the 1930s as all-white institutions. As African Americans from the South began to migrate to northern industrial cities and settle in deteriorating neighborhoods that had served immigrant populations, settlements in these communities had to decide whether or not to integrate programs and staff, remain in the neighborhood, or move to another location; to support public housing or give in to the local prejudices against blacks and whites living together.[10] Hull-House in the mid-1930s embraced a policy of integration and, in its programs, staffing, residency, and summer camp, achieved a greater degree of integration than has been acknowledged by any historians to this date.[11] Not to overstate the successes of the program, the efforts that were made were rather exceptional in the context of heightened violence against African Americans when residential boundaries to enforce segregation were transgressed, and where openly defiant whites bullied the small number of African American families who attempted to integrate public housing—housing built by the federal government.[12]

Charlotte Carr used her ties to the New Deal, the labor movement (and its Left-leaning CIO), and to pro-integrationist activism in the Northeast.[13] Carr’s approach to the race issue as administrator of emergency relief in New York had impressed Dorothy Height, the civil rights leader who had witnessed Carr’s fairness toward blacks during the March 1935 riot in Harlem. The situation in March of 1935 was desperate for African Americans. While African Americans were only eight percent of New York City’s population, they made up forty-two percent of the unemployed on welfare. They were even denied positions on work projects set up by the welfare system, and there was not a single person of color in a position of authority on the management staff of the Welfare Administration. Carr remedied the problem by appointing Height to be personnel supervisor in the central office of the Home Relief Bureau.[14]

Her involvement with civil rights leaders was authentic—race men and women trusted Carr, and when she was about to leave New York for Chicago, a farewell dinner was given in her honor by the African American leadership in New York.[15] The African American community in Chicago, aware of this relationship of trust, anticipated her move to the city.

Carr found that the Hull-House settlement appeared to interact with African Americans in the neighborhood through a women’s club that had been meeting at Hull-House for over a decade. Named the Hull-House Community Club, its members remained a separate (and segregated) club in the settlement house from the late 1920s.[16] Their children were kept separate rather than encouraged to join in the myriad of clubs and activities available for white children.

In the more than forty-five years that Hull-House provided cultural, educational, and recreational activities, there had been two strategies for membership. There were ethnically separate clubs for adults and children that had their origins in the early years when a common language was often not available; there were also activities where cross-ethnic experiences were promoted, and even built into the structure of the settlement through the workings of inter-club councils. Yet the persistence of ethnically separate activities at Hull-House in the 1930s and 1940s points to deeper and more complex cultural and racial issues.[17] “I believe we social workers made a great mistake in the early days in organizing racial groups as such—Bohemian Mothers, Polish Mothers, Italian Mothers and so forth,” Carr reflected. “Perhaps it was necessary. They came here friendless and unable to speak English; naturally they turned to others of their own tongue. But the time for all that has passed. The second generation has learned English in the public schools, and it is now most important for all these residents to realize their mutual interdependence as Americans—to learn that Bohemians, Poles, Italians, Mexicans and Negroes must live together as neighbors and partners in the economic struggle.

Integrating Hull-House was possible during Carr’s tenure in part because radicals like Harvey and Jessie Lloyd O’Connor, and Alexander Saxton, who was studying at the University of Chicago, brought a new spirit to Hull-House. Harvey was formerly editor of The People’s Press; he had written Steel Dictator, The Guggenheims, and Mellon’s Millions. The new group did not displace the Old Guard—dedicated, but limited, women like Nesta Smith, who taught string instruments at Hull-House and revealed her distress when “most of our old reliable European families were moving out.”[18] But for a very crucial, catalytic moment, Leftist New Dealers provided the courage and the context for a new politics and an enthusiasm for integration. Popular Front artists and writers identified as cultural workers; and as white radicals, they wanted to engage with African American cultural workers on the South Side and at Hull-House, where race barriers were being chipped away. It was at the South Side Community Center (SSCC), one of these places of interracial cooperation, that Jessie Lloyd O’Connor, Harvey’s wife, joined the Better Housing League (BHA) movement. The BHA fought restrictive covenants in Chicago’s housing market and advocated non-discrimination policies in public housing projects.[19]

Carr sought out journalist Dewey E. Jones, and his family, and invited them to be the “first” black residents in Hull-House history.[20] Jones needed a salary in order to pay room and board, so Carr engineered a Rosenwald Fund stipend for him and announced that he was going to investigate the conditions of poverty in the neighborhood of Hull-House.

Jones, his wife, Faith Jefferson Jones, a social worker, and their toddler, Dewey E. Jones, Jr., moved into the settlement in 1938. His coming to Hull-House was a public event, fully acknowledged by the Chicago Defender as newsworthy.[21] Jones, who had been an advisor to Harold Ickes in Washington, D.C.,[22] was a good, but in many circles, a controversial choice as the first African American resident at the House. One of the “New Crowd” of more militant civil rights activists,[23] Jones associated with the Left-wing National Negro Congress (NNC), and while resident at Hull-House, he was elected president of the Chicago chapter of NNC. Carr’s choice of Jones was in keeping with her own militancy regarding the advancement of African Americans.

To give greater credence to the argument that Carr was interested in alliances with pro-labor, Left-wing Race men and women, was the appointment of George McCray, also an NNC activist, as a Rosenwald Fellow in the Workers’ Education Department at Hull-House in 1940. Additionally, social worker Lillian Summers, who was elected president of the Chicago NNC after the untimely death of Dewey Jones in April of 1939, became a Hull-House resident in July, 1939.[24] Faith Jones remained at Hull-House after the death of her husband; she served as vice-president of the Chicago NNC.[25] NCC militants were willing to work with white radicals and at Hull-House in the Carr years the two groups were able to make the first real progress toward integrating staff, residents, and programs in the settlement’s history.

What remains less obvious is why Jones would be interested in leaving the national scene and coming back to Chicago and the Near West Side neighborhood.[26] In part, the explanation lies in the international reputation of Hull-House which gave an otherwise local job—research fellow —social and political capital. And partly the reason for Jones’s return to Chicago may well have been the place that city (and the near West Side neighborhood nearby Hull-House) would play in the public housing movement. Jones had been one of the key players in efforts to launch a public housing program in the United States under the auspices of Harold Ickes’ housing division of the Public Works Administration. There was considerable opposition to public housing and its adherents had made slow gains for the cause. For those visionaries who saw the potential for public housing to end slums and reconfigure urban space so that segregation as well as poverty could be eradicated, a federally funded program seemed to fulfill the larger agenda. There was a hitch, however. “Perhaps wishing to make the novel federal presence in urban America as unobtrusive as possible, it was Ickes who promulgated the ‘neighborhood composition rule,’ which prevented government projects from altering the racial composition of their host neighborhoods.”[27] Chicago’s slums, housing shortage, and location as one of the primary cities receiving African Americans from the South—first to work in the war industries and soon after as the destination for the Second Great Migration—made it an ideal place to experiment with public housing. The Near West Side neighborhood associated with Jane Addams’s Hull-House settlement, would offer a test case for interracial public housing projects that could enlist the leadership of the settlement and utilize its reputation as a leader in cutting-edge programs first introduced in the local arena. The reason this was possible, was that there had been a black presence in the neighborhood along with a mix of ethnicities. Thus the projected public housing project could include black and white families under the constraints of the neighborhood composition rule, a situation almost unique in the city of Chicago.[28]

Even before Carr’s arrival at Hull-House, the settlement had looked forward to the placement of public housing in its neighborhood. Hull-House participated with leaders from the Chicago Urban League, the Council of Social Agencies of Chicago, and liberal elements of the real estate industry at the Chicago Urban League’s annual conference in September 1937, which was held at Hull-House’s Bowen Country Club camp in Waukegan, Illinois.[29] On the agenda were topics including public housing, education, and neighborhood renewal issues. Participants at this conference were part of what can be loosely described as a pro-public housing, urban renewal coalition. Dewey Jones had come to the conference from Washington, D.C. Having roots in the Chicago black community, he was an important link between the national housing scene and the local; although Charlotte Carr was not at the meeting, (she would be arriving in Chicago from New York on October 1^st) she had been planning how Hull-House could offer leadership in this coalition for public housing.[30]

Hull-House could not offer leadership in urban renewal and public housing if it did not accomplish substantial achievements in the integration of the settlement, its staff, its residents, and in the clubs, classes, programs, and camp that it ran. Dewey Jones was a key staff member in efforts to integrate the settlement. In the short amount of time that Jones lived at Hull-House he was able to both critique the past record of the settlement on race relations and through his role as an editor and writer for Hull-House publications, introduce a new rhetoric that served to inspire staff, residents, and neighbors to idealize interracialism as an articulated goal. In doing the work of de-mythologizing an iconic institution, while at the same time producing new Hull-House publications that exuded interracial values and images, Jones leaves a complicated legacy in need of contextualization. Reporting to the Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago one year after his appointment to the Hull-House staff, Jones found that the settlement had “not done very much in an interracial sense as far as Negroes are concerned.” He did not believe “this was because of any policy of the House or any decision on anyone’s part but just because of a sort of taking for granted that if an institution was in the heart of the community and had facilities, everyone who needed them would take advantage of them.”[31] Hull-House, purportedly a “melting pot” institution known for welcoming people of all ethnicities and background, even after the arrival of Charlotte Carr, had trouble integrating life at the settlement, and African American participation remained negligible. “It has been my experience,” Jones concluded, “that a very large part of the difficulty that Negroes have in trying to fit into these programs is traceable directly to those people in charge of the programs who assume there will be trouble if they attempt to bring about integration.” [32] He asserted “wherever we have found it possible to break down that idea among the leaders we have found that 90 per cent of the problem was solved and that there was no trouble after the people understood that the leaders wanted it done that way.”

One of the ways that Jones and other integrationists on Carr’s staff challenged the status quo at the settlement was through the vehicle of settlement publications that constructed an integrated Hull-House through images and text. During the Jane Addams years, the annual yearbooks offered basic information about clubs and classes, sometimes with up-dates, and even re-used photographs.[33] They were a formal representation of the philosophy of the settlement house entirely through the lens of the colony of women who, with Addams, ran it, and, most likely, these publications were seen as an organ of publicity and dissemination to a broad readership of potential and actual supporters outside the neighborhood. Rarely are the individuals depicted in the undated photographs named; this anonymity of participants (the neighbors), coupled with the re-use of the images, ironically gives the yearbooks, a genre marking time, a timeless quality. After 1933 the annual publication of a yearbook was discontinued until 1939, when Carr asked Dewey Jones to edit the first annual in six years;[34] Jones, whose formal education in journalism at the University of Michigan and the School of Journalism, Columbia University, and his career as a journalist in the Negro press (Amsterdam News, New York, and the Chicago Defender) more than qualified him to take on the role of journalist-at-large while he was resident at Hull-House,[35] used the opportunity to advance an agenda of interracialism which he shared with Carr and others of her staff.

The 1939 Yearbook appears to have had two major goals; one was to portray Hull-House as an integrating institution, and the other was to identify Hull-House as an agency of the community, deeply committed to renewal of the neighborhood, but also committed to working with community leadership. The first goal was achieved with the placement of Yearbook images that for the first time included African Americans: a photograph of the Benedict Art Gallery featured paintings that have African American subject matter; an image of one of the Hull-House reception rooms (parlor) included a portrait on the wall of an African American. A photograph of a scene from “Marching Song,” a labor play by John Howard Lawson, depicted racial content. There was a winter scene of the Hull-House courtyard accompanied by this text: “It was in this courtyard that thousands of persons of all races, creeds and ages stood on that day in May, 1935, when final rites were held for the founder of Hull-House, Miss Jane Addams.” (Tellingly, there was no portrait of Jane Addams in this revival of the annual yearbook.) Similarly, the text that accompanied a photo spread of the annual Mexican Festival ran: “All races, all creeds, all nationalities enjoy the facilities of Hull-House. An explanation of Christmas at Hull-House, accompanied by four pictures of newly created tableaux depicted the Italian conception of the birth of Christ; the Blessing of Christ in the Church according to Greek tradition; ‘Pasada,’ the Entrance into Bethlehem, according to the Mexican conception and “the Adoration of the Magi from the Negro point of view.” Finally, the yearbook section on Bowen Country Club camp showed several images where African American children were part of the group, including a swimming pool image of black and white children that was shocking in an era in which segregation of municipal pools and beaches in the North as well as the South was a symbol of the widespread acceptance of the separation of the races and where any crossing of boundaries could incite violence by whites against blacks. These scenes portrayed an ideal which Dewey Jones knew was still not fully realized at Hull-House, but they were a dramatic statement of the new direction undertaken by the settlement. “As far as the inter-racial problem goes at Hull House[36],” Jones concluded, “some definite steps have been taken toward bringing about a kind of melting pot, the kind of agency the [Hull] House has stood for in theory all these years.”[37]

A section, “Our Neighbors,” accompanied by photographs of community groups, introduced the reader to the notion that Hull-House was changing and that the new Community Relations Department “started as an experiment” but “has more than justified itself by the response it has received from the neighbors.” The text explained: “It is now obvious that no Settlement House is really complete without its direct contact with the community, and that establishing such contact is a full-sized departmental job in itself.” The story line emphasized that Hull-House was actively supporting a program for better houses, cleaner streets and alleys, better schools, and more playgrounds. Readers were also told that new community clubs have been formed to act as “outposts for Hull-House in its program of slum eradication.” Photographs of the Tay-Mor (Taylor and Morgan streets) Neighborhood Club and the Sholto-Eleventh (Sholto and Eleventh streets), the two community organizations set up as neighborhood outposts for the Hull-House Community Relations Program depicted neighbors and Hull-House staff.

Another example of how Hull-House under Carr’s direction re-framed the relationship between the settlement and the community is in the narrative that developed surrounding the first interracial Hull-House benefit dance held in a downtown Chicago hotel in 1941. According to the Chicago Tribune, no advocate of integration, the nationality clubs—“the Greek, Negro, Italian, and Mexican Mothers’ Clubs”—meeting at the settlement had come together and planned a benefit dance at a downtown hotel to raise money for their activities.[38] Donna Hodgman, a resident at Hull-House from 1936, provides an insider’s account of how the event came about as an interracial affair: “One day a committee from the [Hull-House] Women’s Club, [the oldest women’s group in the settlement and one composed entirely of white English-speaking women] had a meeting with Miss Carr” Hodgman wrote. They told Carr they were thinking about a new way to raise money for the clubs. They proposed renting the ballroom of one of the downtown hotels. Everyone would wear evening clothes and maybe even liquor would be served.[39] Carr thought the plan “ambitious” and wondered if they really meant that everybody would be invited: “I suppose the Mexicans will be in on it?” she asked. Hodgman wrote that the women replied “Certainly, Miss Carr. We don’t have race prejudice, you know.” Carr countered, “How about the Negroes?” Hodgman recalled “At that remark the faces of the committee looked surprised and uneasy.”[40] Carr suggested to the women that they probably had not thought about that aspect yet; she told them “But you and I know that we have Negroes in this house. They are represented in our Interclub Council.” And she went on to say that she could not see how they could give the party without “this important group . . . left out of the plans.” Carr left the decision to them. “Of course, this is your party. You have to work it out yourselves. But I guess you know how I would feel about leaving out the Negroes.”[41] The committee did not answer Carr right away; several days later, after discussions, they told Carr, “We want the Negroes.” Once the all-white Hull-House Women’s Club had made their decision to integrate the party, the next hurdle was to find a hotel willing to accommodate an interracial group, a difficult task in the segregated America of 1941. The committee found two hotels, but the manager of one was not sure his waiters would be polite to the guests. The other hotel, The Stevens, was selected. A politician in the neighborhood told Carr that people in the neighborhood did not like the idea of an integrated party: “Course it may be all right to be in the same room with Negroes,” the politician admitted, “But I wouldn’t sit down at the table and eat with one.” Carr told him they were not planning to serve food. But, according to Hodgman, she was quite disturbed. “What if the Italians, who constituted the largest part of our population, bought tickets [to the event] out of politeness but did not come? A party said to be given by all who used Hull-House but attended only by the Negroes and the Mexicans would be a worse blow to the minority groups than if we had admitted in the first place that the plan would not work.”[42]

The night of the dance, called the Lilac Ball, lilacs were brought from the Bowen Country Club to decorate the hotel ballroom. The Hull-House residents dressed in evening clothes and worried about what might happen. Carr was visibly nervous: “I wish to Heaven they were going to sell liquor,” she remarked.[43] This part of the plan had been dropped because some of the Hull-House trustees had objected. Hodgman described the scene at the hotel as the event got underway:

The Mexicans came, and the Greeks, and the Negroes. A Chinese boy and girl came, and one Armenian and one Japanese. The Italians came and Miss Carr came wearing an orchid . . . . The Mexicans were the fanciest dancers and had their pictures taken for the most newspapers. But the Italians were most at home and specialized in making people comfortable. The Negroes basked in unaccustomed warmth. Pretty soon it was crowded. Pretty soon someone told Miss Carr we had a thousand people.[44]

Carr had pushed the envelope of interracial activities at Hull-House further than almost any other agency in Chicago with the Jane Addams Memorial Lilac Ball. The African American newspaper the Chicago Defender acknowledged the event’s uniqueness and ran a picture with the caption: “Negroes, Mexicans, Chinese, Italians, Poles, Irish, Greeks, Jews, Protestants, Catholics and almost every other racial and religious group were represented in the hundreds of guests who crowded the ballroom of the world’s largest hotel. The spectacle would have pleased the late Jane Addams and given Uncle Sam a good demonstration of real democracy.”[45]

Carr did not hesitate to threaten the deployment of Hull-House connections against instances of discrimination. Louise Gaines (Daugherty), an African American Bowen Country Club (BCC) counselor, relates one striking example. One day Gaines and an integrated group of girl campers walked perhaps five miles north to what is now Illinois Beach State Park. The area then was in private hands but open to the public. Refused entrance by security personnel, Gaines and the campers returned to BCC where, as it happened, the BCC Committee was meeting. Unaware of the beach debacle, Carr invited her to come and brief them. Gaines tells of Carr’s response upon hearing the story:

Charlotte Carr got on the telephone. She wanted to know who owned [the land]. She got hold of somebody who said he was a lawyer. She said, “Well, then I’ll talk to you, because this is a terrible case.” So he said, “Well, I’m just a lawyer. I only serve them when they call on me.” And she said, “Well, if you don’t call on them and tell them about this, they will not be calling you anymore. Because we know that those people who own that [land], hope to sell it to the state. And we have friends in Springfield. If you think that our friends in Springfield are going to let the state buy that, you just think again. And you’ll be out of a job too.” She said, “One more thing. We have friends in Waukegan who are ministers. And if you think that there’s going to be a stream of cars in there after the ministers on Sunday morning say what your philosophy is, there won’t be two cars that come in there tomorrow morning.” The next day, a man came down and they called me and I don’t know whether he was the lawyer, but he apologized to me.[46]

This was an instance when Carr used the power of leadership by example at a time when the actual numbers of African Americans enrolled in the four sessions of the summer camp were small.

The problems of neighborhood racial tensions on the Near West Side were more difficult to address. Carr established a community relations department at Hull-House in 1939 to reach the groups that lived in areas of demographic change who did not yet interact with the settlement house. Under the sponsorship of this department, two small neighborhood centers were started and operated by parents and a staff of neighborhood leaders who were made available by WPA funds. One center was in the African American district south of the settlement and filled a need that had long been recognized by the Hull-House Community Club. As mentioned above, the Community Club had met since the 1920s, but members had not been incorporated fully into settlement life. Carr did not force the Hull-House Women’s Club (white) and the Hull-House Community Club (black) to merge; such decisions in the voluntary associational context of private social settlements in the 1930s were outside the possibilities of even pro-interracialists like Carr. Instead, she focused on empowering the African American women who were club members to run this new center located in their own neighborhood, with WPA and Hull-House funds. The women also reached out to African American businessmen who helped with funding. Activities within the center included a morning pre-school play group, afternoon game periods for school children, weekly dances and English classes for adults, with WPA leadership supervised by the Recreation staff of Hull-House. A mother’s club had been organized and was sponsored by members of the Hull-House Community Club. Carr felt that this center represented an activity where neighborhood leaders were making plans for themselves and carrying them out, with minimum guidance from Hull-House.[47]

Further attempting to enable authentic grass roots activism, Carr met with representative leaders of the African American community to “discuss the future program of Hull-House with regard to the development of the West Side Negro Community.”[48] The meeting was held in the residents’ dining room. Those present were an impressive group, including representatives of the Chicago Urban League, the Joint Council of the Dining Car Employees, the National Negro Congress (NNC), the South Parkway Branch of the YMCA, the Chicago Defender, the Northern District Association of Colored Women, and the Study of the Chicago Negro Community.[49] By pulling together labor activists, clubwomen, social scientists, community activists, and religious leaders, Carr made it clear to the black community that she acknowledged their organizational strength and respected their local leaders. Sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr., who, with W. Lloyd Warner, was co-director of the Study of the Chicago Negro Community, chaired the meeting.[50] As a Popular Front activist, Carr saw the race question in the context of the larger industrial crisis; she easily cooperated with African Americans on the Left—Ishmael Flory, a labor leader with ties to the Communist Party, and George McCray, mentioned earlier, who was executive secretary of the National Negro Congress.[51]

Carr continued to advocate antidiscrimination legislation in housing and jobs when she testified before the Illinois State Commission on the Condition of the Urban Colored Population in 1941; she served on the Chicago Advisory Committee to the Commission.[52] Her engagement with radicals in the black community, and her outspoken advocacy of integrated public housing and integrated trade unions, placed her in the Left wing of the New Deal Democrats.

Cultural Production

The change in the Hull-House aesthetic after the arrival of Charlotte Carr reflected an ideological position that privileged interracialism on the one hand, and authentic working class cultural expression on the other. This twin agenda was possible because key personnel changes that occurred between 1935 and 1937[53] prepared the way for the more dramatic changes in the settlement’s approach to art. One of the major changes can be seen in the approach to drama and tableaux, both in content and presentation. An examination of the material culture and programs of Hull-House reveals surprising evidence of the significant place of Western Christian religious art and music in the settlement’s yearly calendar in its first forty-five years. The high point was the annual Christmas tableaux, an interdisciplinary pageant depicting the traditional story of the child in the manger. Photographs of the traditional Christmas tableaux compared with images of the outdoor crèche display produced by people from the neighborhood during Charlotte Carr’s years at Hull-House illustrate a radical departure under Carr in cultural production at the settlement. Viewing the staging of the Christmas tableaux in the Bowen auditorium at Hull-House reveals at a glance the formalism of cultural production during the Addams years. With an audience of neighborhood families, Hull-House residents, trustees, and wealthy supporters, the annual Christmas performance reinforced the concept that the interchange between rich and poor, Americans and immigrants, Catholics, Protestants and Jews, socialists and capitalists could be enriching for all; such experiences were designed to teach the unity of humanity and promote a civic life in a democracy that “naturalized” differences by equating the hegemonic Christian tradition with universal human values. Children from the neighborhood, including those from Jewish families, participated in the Christmas plays as actors and also took part in choral singing.[54] The pageants and plays were not meant to be a religious service or ritual, but a cultural experience.

From the perspective of late-nineteenth century American ruling elites, Jane Addams was an innovator, in the vanguard of a pro-immigrant cosmopolitanismthat was a minority position in an increasingly racialized world. So powerful, however, was the hegemonic message of universal humanism at Hull-House, regardless of its packaging in the cultural representation of Christian art, that one immigrant Jew minimized the Christian doctrine implied in the tableaux by interpreting it as “a sort of folklore tradition.”[55]

Starr and Addams were grounded in the moral writings of the nineteenth century, the concept that the awakening of the child’s reasoning and moral senses required exposure to ideals of the good, beauty, virtue, and truth that were imbedded in the aesthetic of Western religious art. In Hull-House this meant Madonnas in the crèche and children’s rooms and religious tableaux and reproductions of the great Renaissance artists as moral parables. In a democracy, Addams contended, there needed to be a cultural space in which to experience this “moral” art that was separate from sectarian [religious] space.

The introduction in 1938 of ethnically specific religious expression, a turning away from the artificial unity of Christian moral art separated from worship, in the Christmas tableaux was dangerously close to incorporating the religious observance of each group. What it may have risked in terms of appearing to promote specific religious practice it gained in the sense of authenticity and empowerment ethnic and racial groups experienced when they were able to demonstrate their particular faith in a public place alongside others from related religious traditions. Neighbors responded positively to this new acceptance of unity through diversity of expression. Mrs. Koulla Konomidas, president of the recently revitalized Greek Mothers’ Club at Hull-House “thought the idea of Italians, Greeks, Mexicans, and Negroes working together on one program was ‘Good for us all,’” and she felt the tableaux “’were very beautiful.’”[56]

Photographs of the traditional Christmas tableaux compared with images of the outdoor crèche display “produced” by people from the neighborhood during Charlotte Carr’s years at Hull-House further illustrate a radical departure under Carr in cultural production at the settlement. The outdoor crèche is the work of neighborhood artists without the intervention or direction of teachers.

There was also a subtle shift in the approach to children’s theater. The educative function of theatrical performances was noted by Addams and her colleague Edith de Nancrede.[57] The proliferation of children’s clubs that performed plays was part of a concerted effort to socialize neighborhood children; club members remained affiliated as young adults and retained friendships. Children were taught dancing before they evolved to taking on more ambitious stage performances; dancing was orderly, formal, and taught students etiquette, and made them receptive to instruction that once imprinted, translated to acceptable social behavior for daily life. From a young age club members were introduced to literary form, historical content, and were taught diction, projection, elocution, and movement.[58] While children were given choices within a supervised and well-guided program, there was less emphasis on spontaneity, improvisation, and creativity.[59]

Other changes in the art programs during the Carr years are significant. The retirement or death of key residents in the art, music, and drama departments occurred at the same time that government-sponsored art programs under the New Deal brought new opportunities to re-tool Hull-House art programs; initially, a new group of art teachers and resident artists opened up graphic arts workshops at the settlement through the Graphic Arts Division of the Illinois Art Project (IAP) that was supervised by artist Carl Hoeckner from 1935 to 1938.[60]

More ambitious, however, was the effort to create an art center at Hull-House. Part of the broader effort to support the people’s art, the art center movement rejected superimposing “preconceived ideas of art,” in favor of finding, developing and broadening “the indigenous culture of the community.”[61] Charlotte Carr and forward-thinking architect and city planner William F. Deknatel[62] with close ties to the settlement, began a negotiation with the Illinois Art Project that satisfied the guidelines of the federal program and also advanced Hull-House’s interests in revitalizing and modernizing its facilities and programs. George Thorp, who became head of the IAP in 1938, pushed community art centers and children’s art programs, two initiatives overlooked by the unpopular and conservative former IAP director, Increase Robinson.[63] Deknatel consulted with Thorp in the summer of 1939 and worked out an arrangement:[64] the IAP would participate in “directorship and supplying staff and helpers whereas the supplying of plant, equipment, materials and general administration is Hull-House responsibility.”

The settlement had a good deal of space but a very small budget and Deknatel’s solution was to “enlist enough private assistance to enable us to put our plant on a more modern basis” and he convinced Frank Lloyd Wright, who was critical of federal programs, to chair a sponsoring committee to raise funds.[65] Carr had been concerned about the Hull-House contribution to an expanded art program and also was aware in 1939 that all the federal art programs risked cancellation or budget cuts. Reassured by Deknatel’s efforts to develop private resources, the newly named Hull-House Art Center began its collaboration with the Illinois Art Project in October 1939. Emily Edwards became the Hull-House Art Center director,[66] and William B. Fyfe of the IAP supervisor of the department.[67] By 1940 Hull-House was calling the new art department “The Hull-House Center & Design Workshop and listed among its staff artists Macena Barton, Todros Geller, Edward Millman, Bernece Berkman, Julio de Diego, Carl Hoeckner, and Emily Edwards. Deknatel, who was responsible for the focus on design, envisioned developing community-based planning initiatives thru classes and workshops held at the center.[68]

The cultural production agenda merged with the new politics of interracialism when African American art was exhibited in the Benedict Art Gallery at the settlement. The gallery, which opened in May 1938, exhibited “artwork by Chicago Negro artists” July 6^th to 24^th.[69] We have virtually no information about this exhibition which was arguably the first one of its kind at the settlement house.[70] Over a year later, however, an exhibition of seventy-two paintings and sculpture by African American artists, again at the Benedict Art Gallery, received wide publicity in the black and mainstream press. Conservative art critic Eleanor Jewett mentioned the event in her Chicago Tribune column without critical comment; noted Chicago Daily News critic C. J. Bulliet reviewed the show and deemed it “well-chosen”, but found the paintings “largely ‘derivative,’ and of about the same caliber of work by white artists of leftist tendencies who over concern themselves with the woes of the downtrodden race.”[71]

Bulliet focused on the “race melancholy” he found in most of the paintings and the sculpture, although he acknowledged that Nate Thomas “ha[d] avoided screeching melodrama” in his figure of “a nude young Negro lashed to a tree stump,” the victim of a lynching. Bulliet compared “the presentation of suffering now passed” in the Thomas depiction of a southern lynching with the emotional content found in some medieval sculpture of Christ being taken from the cross. Bulliet found the paintings expressive, and admitted that “occasionally the Negro artists . . . put into their pictures something genuinely racial without being maudlin.” But he was disturbed that “the show never gets quite happy,” a remark revealing more about the critic than the art on display.[72]

Only African American journalist Willard Motley, who featured the exhibit in the National Urban League’s magazine, Opportunity, saw real talent and the promise of greatness in the art.[73]

The artists included sculptors Nate Thomas and Olivia Caldwell; and painters Charles White, Eldzier Cortor, Bernard Goss, Charles Davis, William Carter, Henry Avery, Ramon Gabriel, Charles Sebree, Earl Walker, and Fred Hollingsworth. This was an impressive array of young talent, a new generation following “the trail blazed . . . by William E. Scott, Archibald J. Motley, Charles G. Dawson and William Farrow.”[74] Motley was enthusiastic about the new group “allowed to express itself through the assistance of the Federal Art Project” and he argued that “most of the canvases have a decisive, finished appearance—disproving the opinion of many white critics who feel that the Negro artist should have something primitive in his soul that should find its way to the canvas”; For Motley, the paintings by Charles White (“Lust for Bread,” “Gussie,” and “Evangelist”)were “powerful”; Eldzier Cortor, “perhaps the most original of the group” showed “remarkable versatility” in such paintings as “Brother and Sister,” “And So To Bed,” and “Where Once A Dwelling Stood.” He thought Charles Davis had “a number of outstanding canvases, chief among them ‘Low Cost of Living,’” which Motley thought was “handled in almost a Utrillo tone.” Rejecting the idea that some white critics held—that Negro art work should be crude and unfinished—Motley chose, instead, to define this new group of black artists in the cosmopolitanism of the large city in which they lived and painted and view them alongside white artists who were also working with an urban vocabulary. Of the painters, Motley considered Fred Hollingsworth “the lone primitive” and judged Davis, Cortor, and White the strongest of the group. They, with Goss and possibly Carter, “seem[ed] to have the best chance to really ‘arrive’ [in the art world] some day.”[75]

In its efforts to showcase local African American artists, Hull-House settlement—as a white institution—had taken the lead in an acknowledgement of the achievements of black visual artists and had broken the color line that had kept African American artists out of the galleries and museums of the city. It is curious that none of the reviews or news articles of the exhibit, including mentions in the Chicago Defender, comment on this dimension of the event. Perhaps the venue, outside the rooms and halls of high culture in downtown Chicago, allowed reviewers/viewers to see the work as cultural artifact and not necessarily as “professional” art. This argument about the nature of African American culture—its primitiveness; its folk quality; its lack of completion as an art form—was exactly what Alain Locke and others attacked in the effort to redefine black culture. Willard Motley’s review in Opportunity makes clear that the artists are authentic and must be judged like any other artists as well as in terms of their particular experiences. Motley’s review is influenced by the viewpoint he has taken as a writer who places himself in an interracial urban milieu and refuses to be limited by an ethnic or racial category.

The 1939 Benedict Gallery exhibit of African American artists was held less than a year before the American Negro Exposition opened at the Chicago Coliseum on the city’s Near South Side. The Art Exhibition of the Negro Exposition included work by Charles White, Eldzier Cortor, Henry Avery, Charles Davis, Bernard Goss, and Charles Sebree—all artists whose work had been shown at the settlement.[76] The American Negro Exposition, planned to commemorate the seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and funded partly by the Illinois State Legislature, was an implicit rebuff of the Jim Crow policy of the gallery and museum world of Chicago.[77] The Hull-House settlement embraced this rejection of cultural Jim Crow and, instead, saw itself in the vanguard of creating interracial cultural space.

Carr also encouraged new literary productions by residents and neighbors which reflected the settlement’s embrace of cultural production from the bottom up. This was in keeping with earlier attempts to encourage cultural production by the neighborhood people. During Adena Miller Rich’s short tenure as Head Resident, the Hull-House Octagon appeared. Nicely printed by young men from the neighborhood in the Hull-House print shop, Octagon had a traditional format with headlines, and news stories about activities at the settlement. The writers were also neighborhood young adults—perhaps high school age—whose Italian surnames indicated they came from families with deep connections to Hull-House. Florence Giovangelo would in the 1950s and early 1960s emerge as a community leader—Florence Scala—in the politics of urban renewal. Noteworthy about Octagon was its production solely by young people from the neighborhood. They included items about their social life and even teasing references to personality quirks and romantic foibles, which seemed to indicate that Octagon was a publication for their consumption. This distinguished it from the bulletins and yearbooks Hull-House had produced with a different audience in mind during Jane Addams’s tenure. The annual yearbooks, for example, repeated basic information about clubs and classes, sometimes with up-dates, and even re-used photographs.[78] They were a formal representation of the philosophy and programs of the settlement house entirely through the lenses of the colony of women who, with Addams, ran it, and, most likely, these publications were seen as an organ of publicity and dissemination to a broad readership of potential and actual supporters outside the neighborhood. Rarely are the individuals depicted in the undated photographs named; this anonymity of participants (the neighbors), coupled with the re-use of the images, ironically gives the yearbooks, a genre marking time, a timeless quality. Unfortunately there are few, if any, traces of publications written by the groups who came to Hull-House regularly over multiple years, until we get to the Octagon.[79]

Block News, an informal mimeographed newspaper edited by Dewey E. Jones, was a new departure for the settlement. During 1939 it appeared weekly and contained news articles covering music, art, and theater, publicizing upcoming events and encouraging residents’ and neighbors’ participation; it emphasized events related to progressive political causes and performances that reflected the values of multiculturalism and inter-racialism.

Above all there was a blurring of the boundaries between the settlement house and the community. There were the insiders—among the residents and the neighbors—who knew the new lingo and the personalities. Expanding on the human interest notes that began appearing in the Octagon, Block News stories weaved information about individual neighbors and broke down the barriers between those who offered the community service through the programs and activities of the settlement, and those who came to the 13-building complex to partake of educational, social, recreational, and cultural opportunities.

Carr also endorsed the efforts of a group of writers who were in residence at the settlement when they planned to start a literary magazine on the style of the “little magazines” that had cropped up outside of mainstream publishing houses during the 1920s and 1930s. Hull-House Magazine, edited by William P. Schenk, with Alexander Saxton and Willard Motley as associate editors, first appeared in November of 1939. There were a total of three issues between 1939 and 1940.[80] Schenk and Saxton were residents at the settlement; the former “was an enormous admirer and friend of Carl Sandburg” and the latter was a University of Chicago student with literary ambitions.[81] An African American from an educated and talented middle-class family, Motley was raised on Chicago’s South Side in the almost all-white Englewood neighborhood. His father, Archibald Motley, Sr., was a Pullman porter, and his brother, Archibald, Jr., eighteen years older than Willard, was well-known as an artist.[82] In this household Motley had been encouraged to follow his interest in writing; he published his stories and articles from the age of thirteen and through his column in the Defender, had become a local personality.[83] Motley attended the Englewood High School at a time when just a small minority of African American students was in attendance.[84]

After graduation in 1929, Motley turned away from his middle-class background in pursuit of a literary career. He was influenced by novelists Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell, as well as “Depression-era road reportage”[85] and spent years traveling in the United States before he moved, in 1938, to the Maxwell Street neighborhood of Chicago near Hull-House.[86]

Little is known about how the Hull-House Magazine came to be (or why, for that matter, it only produced three issues). The moment was ripe for such a literary collaboration under Charlotte Carr’s warm embrace of activism, cultural expression, and interracial exchange. Several themes dominated the three issues of the magazine. One was the identification of the contemporary social struggle as a class struggle, with the writers and editors situating themselves as workers; they felt no contradiction in identifying their struggle for personal recognition as producers of culture with the struggle for transformation of the capitalist system. They chose to end economic and social inequality by unleashing the power of democracy itself. Democracy was at risk in the neighborhood and in the world; the masses were inherently good, but needed awakening, education, organization, but this process could not be imposed from on high by professional social workers. The writers generally supported New Deal programs, trade unions, experiments in the cooperative movement and public housing; they were critical of the rich, large corporations, politicians who were on the take, and bourgeois culture. Overall, their faith in “the people” would have appeared hopelessly simplistic, but was saved by the social realism that portrayed the magazine’s major subject matter—the world of the Hull-House neighborhood—with all its blemishes, inconsistencies, and even its criminal elements.

From the editors and writers standpoint, in its sympathetic, but realistic, portrayal of “the people” (three years after the publication of Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes, the Great Depression’s epic poem), The Hull-House Magazine unequivocally and unabashedly promoted democracy in a world where democratic institutions were imperiled. The short stories, reportage on the people along Halsted Street and the Near West Side, and art work of the magazine reveled in common place activities, marveled at the diversity of peoples and their cultures, and sang the praises of the natural generosity of the working class who were willing to share whatever modest resources they had with needy neighbors.

Writers included experienced and inexperienced—published and those who hoped to be published. Alice E. Treleaven, Don Morris, Harvey O’Connor, Milton S. Mayer, Lawrence Hodges, Beatrice Schenk, John O’Connell, Morris Mitchell signed articles in addition to the three editors. Mitchell lived in the neighborhood and gave guided tours at Hull-House; O’Connell did not live at Hull-House; he was formerly employed as a receptionist at the Illinois Research Hospital and, in 1940, was unemployed. Milton S. Mayer was a Hull-House resident, a writer, and on the staff of the University of Illinois in the office of the president. Don Morris lived at Hull-House and was a publicity writer at the University of Chicago. Beatrice Schenk, William’s wife, was a social worker. Alice Treleaven lived at Hull-House where she taught citizenship and English courses and chaired the United Conference on the High Cost of Living. Lawrence Hodges was a Hull-House resident. He had worked in co-operative stores and was with the Railroad Retirement Board. Harvey O’Connor was, at the time, the most published of the group.

The most striking feature of Hull-House Magazine is the fascination with the neighborhood, which is portrayed in black and white graphics by William Jacobs, who during this period was a WPA artist, and by Alexander Saxton. Using varied genres—short story, parable, sociological or ethnographic sketch, journalism—the writers and editors devoted the majority of the space to portrayals of the local scene. For example, in the first issue, an article by Willard Motley, “Hull-House Neighborhood,” describes the street: “People come out on the street. A formless, rabble rank of shapeless bodies, hunched shoulders, hard faces. A scare-crow parade of battered felts, baggy pants, ragged coats.”[87] One shift of steel mill and factory workers come home, back “to their cavern shacks” while another heads out for work as milk trucks circle the dairy, ready for morning deliveries. He notes the synagogue on Union Avenue, with ancient Hebrew script on its walls; the frame convent on Newberry where “through the soft-lit window one sees the sisters in their gentle black as they kneel at prayer—their hands like the spreading wings of doves. St. Francis’ bell blesses the neighborhood; Halsted’s angelus calling a sparse flock.”[88]

The short piece ends as the morning has arrived fully. “The sun now puts a gold-plate on the streets. And even Maxwell is a charming lane, sunny and bright…This neighborhood in early morning has a beauty all its own. And somehow these are clean streets, fresh streets, hopeful streets.”[89]

Just as the neighborhood itself is a physical presence replete with contradictions—ugliness and beauty; despair and hope—the people, too, offer up their contradictions. Beyond this, the neighborhood while local, also stands for universal truths. The second issue of the magazine is even more focused than the first in developing the street as metaphor for larger political and social ideas. Editor Schenk introduces the contents with a short prose-poem, “This Our Neighborhood” that intimates this local space can stand for “other cities in all directions everywhere.”[90]

There is a sense that “the people” of the neighborhood are quiet at the moment, but they are potential agents of social change. Motley’s “Pavement Portraits” is made up of short pieces: The Street; Crap Shooters; Lady in the Half-Light of A Doorway; and A Handful. These describe prostitutes, preachers, petty criminals, gamblers and alcoholics. The street is local and global, “a small hub around which a little world revolves” connected to Jerusalem, Africa, Mexico, Italy, and Greece. The people are humanized, not judged; they are found to be surprisingly intelligent, generous to one another, even though living in poverty, accepting and tolerant. Motley describes the ecology of poverty with these portraits on the pavement: the bums pick through the garbage behind the restaurant; thrifty individuals collect pieces of wood, old lumber, broken orange crates to use for fuel during the cold winter. Trying not to romanticize the neighbors, Motley ends: “Yes, they live here. The weary men, the haggard women, the ragged children. They live here—portraits in pavement.”[91] Characteristic of his writing style and his loner stance—Motley never conformed to the worker writer model—there is no specific political message here. Nor do his characters voice a political message. Again in Motley’s “Handfuls” stories that appear in the last volume of the magazine, the working class and poor people’s generosity to each other is iterated, followed by a quote from Jane Addams: “In every neighborhood where poorer people live, because rents are supposed to be cheaper there, is an element which, although uncertain in the individual, in the aggregate can be counted upon.”[92]

Schenk’s “Achilles of Halsted Street,” a biography of a local Greek immigrant, unlike Motley’s stories, demonstrates the politics of the main character in a talky manner. The piece is about the realized and the unfulfilled promise of America. Schenk quotes his subject’s words: “’What’s wrong with this country? You want to know what’s wrong? I tell you. It’s the rich people. They’re wrong. They have a sickness that’s the wrong with this country. They have the sickness to make more, always to get more and more. That’s their sickness. That’s what’s wrong with this country.’”[93] Two neighborhood parables by Milton S. Mayer continue on this anti-capitalist theme; Mayer’s rich men live unhappy lives. In “Cabrini Street Fables” a very unhappy rich man is made happy, ironically, when presented with a blueprint presented of a shroud with pockets. Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 16. “Cabrini Street Fables: II” is a moral tale about whether or not a man who lost his money and who stole food for his children was good or bad; in heaven, God determines that the man who stole bread and cheese to feed his family because he was a victim of circumstances, was a good man; but that the so-called upstanding man who owned eighty-six utility companies and made profits even when the companies went sour, was not a good man. Hull-House Magazine, December 1939, Vol. I, No. II, 13..

Alice Treleaven has an article on consumer cooperatives or organizations as they are called. She describes a variety of efforts that consumers are making. There are no specifics given, nor are any local organizers mentioned; no report on what Hull-House per se is doing about consumer organizations or even if they have one. Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 8. On the other hand, Lawrence Hodges’s article about “Co-operation at Hull-House” had not much to report, since the Halsted Street Co-operative Society “is as yet only beginning to attain the ends desired. It plans many things to make social and economic organization more effective.” Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 18.

Harvey O’Connor in his “To Break the Charmed Circle,” proposed a plan to provoke political awareness and action among the vast majority of apathetic citizens in Chicago. The vehicle for the provocation was to be a four-page monthly publication—short on text, long on illustrations, images—to be written by the politically savvy, published for distribution by about 10,000 willing participants who pledge to hand out 10 copies; and a thousand of the 10,000 will pledge to distribute 100 copies. The content of the four-page monthly will be the basic facts of life that informed citizens need to know in order to be energized to participate intelligently in the political process as voters. O’Connor reflected the political doldrums that so many progressives were feeling at the end of 1939. His idea was not to create a political organization duplicating present parties and groups, but to serve as an auxiliary to all progressive civic groups, interested either in one or in all subjects. This process of identifying important facts that John Q. Public needed to know so that engagement and activism or participation in the political process would follow, was a way to get rid of the bewilderment and apathy O’Connor believed was paralyzing progressives; it gave progressives a focus and a way to harness themselves for a simple, productive task. (Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 12-13.)

Beatrice Schenk’s “The Children’s Group Theatre” reported on the children’s drama programs at the settlement under the direction of Viola Sills and Ed Spolin. Schenk highlighted the underlying agenda of the children’s drama work: it was to unleash the creativity of each child rather than to perfect a theatrical production. “In Sills’ group,” Schenk explained, “it doesn’t matter whether or not the kids know the lines—but they have to know the meaning of the lines and of the play; and they have to develop characters that have meaning.” Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 19. At Hull-House “the children exercise their inalienable right to create. They are learning to be intelligent audiences. Honesty of subject matter and presentation are expected of them in their own work….” (Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1,20-21).

Alexander Saxton’s “The Road to Damascus” is a consideration of the ethical value, comparatively, of saloons and religious missions. Halsted Street had an abundance of both. Saxton was not original in his sociological observations; residents at Hull-House had realized that there were positive functions served by saloons; and they were predisposed to being analytical and skeptical about conversions at missions. Hull-House Magazine, December 1939, Vol. I, No. II,18.

John O’Connell writes an article “Clinical Sketches” about his experience working in the dispensary of a large hospital one mile west of Hull-House. These are very short paragraphs about individual cases and are impressionistic glimpses rather than exhaustive case studies. Hull-House Magazine, December 1939, Vol. I, No. II, 26.

Morris Mitchell, a volunteer non-resident, was paid by the WPA to serve as a guide at Hull-House. He was hired in 1938. Mitchell’s article evokes the language and ideas of Carr, her staff, and residents. “Miss Carr was very democratic and consulted my wishes about every detail. She imposed no regulations as to what I was to say or how I was to say it. I would be put in possession of the necessary sources of information. The rest was up to me. Here was liberty and democracy enough—and no chance for an alibi in case of failure.”

(Morris Mitchell, “On Being A Guide at Hull-House,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III, 3). But then Mitchell contradicted himself when he explained how HH resident John Kennicott Brenton trained him: “We visited every place to which sightseers are taken, and he told me what to say, and occasionally what not to say, at each point. Did I know what a settlement house was?” (Morris Mitchell, “On Being A Guide at Hull-House,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III, 3). After this process Mitchell said “Hull-House and its residents, I was glad to discover, bore no resemblance to my former vague ideas of reforms and reformers. Hull-House was a poor man’s school—a meeting place and a university for the people. And here lived intelligent persons, thoughtful people, men and women who cared. Here they had erected an oasis of tolerance and intelligence and light in that desert of self-seeking, of often reckless and irresponsible self-seeking, as it seemed to me, called Chicago.” (Morris Mitchell, “On Being A Guide at Hull-House,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III, 4.)

John Kennicott Brenton, 67 [in 1953], member of a pioneer Chicago family and active for many years in social work, died yesterday in Billings, Montana, where he had lived since 1947. From 1935 to 1947 he was a resident in Hull-House. He moved to Billings to become supervisor of social work for the bureau of Indian Affairs. (“J. Kennicott Brenton.” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 14, 1953, pg. B10.) Kennicott Brenton was chair of the residents’ committee at Hull-House. (“Tribute Paid An Old Friend of Hull House,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 3, 1943, pg. 22.)

Since visitors came from all over the country, and from foreign countries, too, Mitchell found that his work as a guide allowed him “to have his finger on the pulse of America—even of the whole world.” Morris Mitchell, “On Being A Guide at Hull-House,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III, 7. “Another one [of the advantages of being a guide] is the opportunity, ass part of this organization, to do one’s bit for tolerance, democracy, personal liberty and enlightenment in this changing world, let us say, to help democracy solve some of her new problems—problems that must be solved if she is to hold her place, or to advance in these times.” Morris Mitchell, “On Being A Guide at Hull-House,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III, 7.

This third number, and probably what is the last issue of the magazine, had an appeal for submissions by others to the editors. The editors saw themselves as “middle-men between two groups” the one writing and other reading.” What they needed was writers submitting articles or essays, short stories or poems, notes about experiences “which you have had in Hull-House or in the neighborhood: anything significant, or funny, or peculiar, written up in one or two paragraphs”; letters; criticism; Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III,8. In this same issue Harvey O’Connor’s “Mansion On Earth” supports public housing and details the support for public housing put forward by Ed Konomidus, a member of the Greek Olympic Club; Konomidus, says O’Connor, find the “’only trouble about the Jane Addams Houses’” is that “’there ought to be a hundred of them all over the city, or a thousand. Why should people have to live in dark houses where children get sick?’” Harvey O’Connor, “Mansion On Earth,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III,15. As O’Connor puts it, “to thousands who live there, these Houses are not so much the Chicago of Tomorrow as paradise today.” Harvey O’Connor, “Mansion On Earth,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III,12. O’Connor quotes from Mrs. Konomidis and also Salvatore Grieco and Ed Konomidis in what almost sound like testimonials. O’Connor draws in wonderful detail the way in which these individuals had interacted with Hull-House: “Mrs. Konomidis herself has taught weaving at the [Jane Addams] Houses. ‘You learned in the old country?’ ‘Oh no, I learned at Hull-House, and Miss Edwards helped us to get started over here.’ She showed work that she had done herself—beautiful drapes that would grace a Gold Coast home but which actually hung in her own rooms. Although the Houses have plenty of clubs, Mrs. Konomidis still comes over to Hull-House for meetings of the Greek Mothers’ Club.” Harvey O’Connor, “Mansion On Earth,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III,13.

“Salvator Grieco and Ed Konomidis were both pioneers at the Jane Addams Houses. Grieco lived on Racine, just opposite from where they were building the new Houses; he and his wife used to look in to see how the work was getting on. But he hesitated about moving. ‘I was on WPA then, and you know how that is. I didn’t know whether we could keep up the rent regularly, and people were saying that if you didn’t pay on the first, you’d be kicked out on the fifth, and that investigators would always be snooping around.’ Harvey O’Connor, “Mansion On Earth,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III,13.

“’And were they?’ ‘Oh no. The only investigator who ever came into our apartment was an inspector who wanted to see if the rooms had been painted properly. And the management has a heart—people aren’t kicked out if they [ ]to pay and have any prospect of paying. I guess these rumors were the work of the landlords.’” Harvey O’Connor, “Mansion On Earth,” Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III,13.

How reliable were the people? How far could political and social activists count on “the people”? Alex Saxton’s article in the first issue argued that democracy was being challenged by the power of big business. He questioned England and France’s argument that the coming war was necessary to defend democracy. Instead he saw France and England fighting to defend their world dominance as colonial powers. In 1939 Saxton, along with many on the Left, was anti-war and identified the real enemy facing the United States not in Germany or Russia, but in the domestic troubles of industrial capitalism in the U.S. These economic problems, Saxton feared, would not be solved by the U.S.’s entrance into a world war and, instead, would threaten democracy because of the concomitant consolidation of power that such an undertaking would necessitate. As much as he championed “the people,” he was concerned that in a war mode, it was possible that the country “may accept government for the people by big business” which would be the end of democracy.[94] Historically, when confronted with serious challenges, Saxton noted “the people turns back to answers that were adequate” at an earlier time. “It shuts its eyes to actual conditions, and trusts in ritual phrases—free competition, due process of law, land of the free, always room at the top. It is the people which becomes emotionally attached to old institutions, and which with the highest motives resists all efforts to keep democracy functioning.”[95]

It was in the theater department that change under Carr most resembled the style and ideology of the Cultural Front. Jess Ogden described the manner in which theater functioned to bring “about a harmony of the various groups with which the settlement must work.” He noted that there was a large Mexican group that had three factions composed respectively of Catholics, Communists, and liberals. Someone in the Hull-House staff came up with the idea of having a real Mexican fiesta. This became an opportunity to unite the various factions. Hull-House during the Addams’s years scheduled an Italian night or a German night, but never attempted to incorporate the Italian street festa as a vehicle for promoting mutuality and understanding between the various factions within the Italian community. Ogden explained how Hull-House used the Mexican fiesta: “The older people of all factions were invited to recall traditions and customs and to help with the planning of the carnival. The younger people went to work on pageants and plays, each faction planning something in which it was especially interested. The help of other actors were enlisted and three episodes in the history of Mexico were finally produced before an audience composed of the entire community in carnival mood. Not only did the factions forget their differences in admiring each other’s contributions, but also there resulted a better understanding on the part of other groups in the community.” Both Ogden and Helen Tieken Geraghty, who also worked on the carnival, believed that the change wrought by the fiesta was not merely temporary but had lasting value.[96]

Halsted Street is the best example of how Carr and Ogden used the arts to foster racial and ethnic integration and cooperation. Hodgman said Ogden wanted the play “to have guts” and believed it had the power to pull together “all the existing dramatic groups” and, in addition, “dozens of others” including “neighborhood people as well as residents.”[97] She quoted Ogden as saying, “I’d like to tie up all these little crotchety groups we’ve got here at Hull House, get ’em to work together on one big project that is as socially significant as all Hell. Get a lot of residents in on it too. Be good for ’em.”[98]

One of the residents who joined the project was Donna Hodgman’s husband, Crosby, who was asked by Ogden to take the part of the streetcar conductor.[99] “All Hull House now waited, breathless and high—and I too,” Donna wrote. A week before the preview performance, the whole concept clicked for Donna: “Now at last I saw the stage with five levels . . . and the blackouts. I heard the music and the speech chorus. I saw little short skits on all sorts of subjects because all subjects belonged to Halsted Street[,] the longest street in Chicago.”[100]

Donna repeated the choral lyrics: “All races . . . all creeds . . . all colors . . . all degrees. Halsted Street was everything and everybody: Chicago and the world. Love was on Halsted Street, and fighting, and stealing, and dirt, and joy, and nobility.”[101]

The chorus of Halsted Street sang out: “Jane Addams saw and faced and met/These things that are to show/Hull-House must see, and face, and strive to meet. There’s a keener fire under the melting pot right now/ Than culture. It is common need.”[102] The message of the play is that the issues of industrial democracy have immediacy in this era of the Great Depression and provide the experience all share: “This is our living, all around us/ This is neither Negro Mexican nor Greek/ Nor Jew, Italian, nor Irish.”[103] Halsted Street previewed on May 19, 1939, to an audience of Hull-House Associates, a group that Charlotte Carr had put together to develop national support for the settlement. Robert Morss Lovett, a Hull-House resident mentioned earlier for his support of radical unemployed councils, was the main speaker at the dinner that evening, followed by the production of the play.[104] Following the preview for an audience who could pay one dollar for a ticket, the play was scheduled for the neighborhood, with tickets priced at fifteen cents.[105]

For Donna Hodgman, the play was a success: “Hundreds of people acted the parts of their own lives; hundreds of others saw, and could not avoid the knowledge that they saw themselves.”[106] She counted the success in the fact that “the warring factions of Hull House had learned to work together on a single project with unprecedented success. We knew that Mexicans, Negroes, Italians, Greeks, and just plain Americans had, for a little while, stood shoulder to shoulder.”[107] Yet a play is never the panacea for what ailed an institution like Hull-House in 1939. Three years later the Hodgmans left. Donna had been completely exhausted by her Hull-House job as House Manager.[108]

Jess Ogden, who felt that with Halsted Street they had “reached the saturation point” on pushing issues of social significance, turned once more to using the stage as a way of “getting all those warring groups working together.”[109] His production of The Pirates of Penzance included “almost everyone who had anything to do with Hull House” and was a triumph in cooperation “all the more significant” since Ogden left the settlement in 1941, one month before the opera was produced.[110] His leaving was the result of continuing budget problems. It signaled the end of Hull-House’s engagement with the rhetoric and style of the New Deal experiment with theater for the people. It also indicated that Carr’s program for Workers’ Education was at risk because of federal budget cuts.

Political and Labor Activism

Charlotte Carr did not simply protect the radicals who found Hull-House a welcoming place. Carr and the new staff that she immediately put together at Hull-House politicized the residents already at the house, and made them feel as if they were part of a social movement. Carr’s politics were a matter of public record[111] and were in agreement with many activist social workers and settlement leaders nationwide who saw the benefits of the New Deal programs in their neighborhoods and who fought to maintain or increase the appropriations against mounting criticism of the FDR administration.[112] Bowen, who was personally involved in the hiring process, was also well aware of Carr’s “very strong personality” and her deep interest in working-class issues. She supported hiring Carr as the first director (the former title of head resident was retired) who would receive a salary.[113] Later on, however, Bowen would find Carr’s leadership unacceptable.

In many ways, Charlotte Carr picked up where Jane Addams had ended and renewed the settlement’s commitment to offering political leadership for social movement causes. On the political front the new director immediately made herself known. Early in 1938, she convinced the trustees to agree to allow the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee to rent Bowen Hall to have a meeting on the policing of industrial disputes with a showing of the controversial Paramount newsreel of the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre in South Chicago near the Republic Steel Plant.[114] She endorsed the Gutknecht, a municipal judge who was running in the Democratic primary for state’s attorney.[115] A quote from Carr was prominently displayed in a campaign brochure that included endorsements from Eleanor Roosevelt; Dr. John Lapp, leading Catholic layman and chair of the Civil Liberties Committee; and Dr. Preston Bradley, pastor of the People’s Church, a progressive congregation in Chicago known for its social justice activism.[116]

By the end of the year, Carr was one of a group of New Dealers, academics, and labor leaders who had sent a telegram to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes asking him to run for mayor of Chicago.[117] The effort failed, but Carr had involved herself in the sectarian affairs of the Democratic Party of Cook County. She also revealed that her sympathies were with the Left-wing of the New Deal coalition. Carr liked Ickes’ approach to unions and public housing (he supported expansion of both) and agreed with his efforts to end discrimination against African Americans in employment and housing.

A political pragmatist, Carr then used her name and the reputation of the Hull-House settlement to advance the cause of the Democratic candidate for mayor, Edward J. Kelly who would cooperate with New Deal programs. In a classic Carr move, she made sure that Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, her former boss in New York, stopped at Hull-House en route to San Francisco where he was visiting that city’s exposition. La Guardia held a news conference at the settlement, where he predicted that Kelly would win against the Republican candidate Dwight H. Green, saying, “‘If the major issue is the New Deal, the New Deal must win in a city like Chicago.’”[118] Kelly’s opponent, a mugwump-type high-minded Republican, most likely was a candidate far more acceptable to Louise Bowen, a lifelong Republican.[119] Bowen looked with alarm at the popularity of FDR and, on the local level, found the strengthening of machine politics that appeared to go hand-in-hand with the New Deal a frightening prospect. Carr, on the other hand, was ready and willing to deal with machine politicians and Left-leaning labor leaders to reach the goal of putting Americans back to work. There was Bowen’s anxiety, too, about whether or not traditional financial contributors to Hull-House would continue to support the settlement if Carr’s pro-New Deal politics were too pronounced. “I hope she will not be too violently for Roosevelt because almost all the money which supports the [Hull] House comes from [Wendell] Willkie supporters and they would not like our endorsing Roosevelt” Bowen wrote in 1940.[120]

Carr also brought a New Deal “politics” to the internal organization of the settlement house. Here she was breaking new ground. She wanted residents and staff—social workers, cooks, engineers, waiters and janitors—to be organized and to know their rights. In the old days the “residents”[121] of the settlement, who were mainly affluent and well-educated young women and men following the volunteer example set by Jane Addams, had included radicals, socialists, labor leaders, and social reformers. Residents practiced self-government and made decisions about the daily details of group living as well as policy. After a period of probation, those already in residence voted a newcomer “in” or “out.” Residents paid room and board and agreed to volunteer their time in Hull-House activities. Some residents worked at jobs during the day. The majority of the residents were single women, but single men as well as married couples, occasionally with children, also lived at the settlement.[122]

Carr brought a new perspective to Hull-House as a result of her background in the field of labor.[123] It matched changes already occurring in the settlement movement where volunteerism was on the wane by the 1920s.[124] At Hull-House traditional residency continued to have a significant role in the settlement until 1963, but increasingly there were residents who served as “staff” and received salaries, and staff who did not live at Hull-House. During the Carr years, the number of residents increased to around one hundred, with a greater proportion of residents functioning as paid staff, including many Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers.[125] For Carr, industrial democracy required that workers, including white-collar workers, join organizations. “I don’t know why it is thought shocking that social workers should be in a union,” she wrote. “To me it is shocking that they are not.” This was not primarily about better wages: “The need for organization among social workers is secondarily to better our own conditions. . . . [W]e need organization in order to have enough political power to go to our legislatures or to Washington” since “in a democracy we get action only as we work in an organized way, representing a certain number of votes.”[126] Carr reported strong interest among different groups at Hull-House to enter into union contracts; a group planned to join an AFL union for engineers.

More controversial was the desire, on the part of other staff members—social workers, coffee house workers, service workers, office workers—to join the Social Service Employees Union (SSEU), a CIO affiliate. There were three unions in the social work field at the time: the union of public employees; the American Association of Social Workers (AASW) and the SSEU. The AASW was really a professional organization that became, with the National Conference of Social Work, “the country’s major organizational spokespeople for federal welfare.”[127] Carr was willing to negotiate with the SSEU, perceived as a new, militant union that did not have the respect of the established social work profession.[128] The trustees voiced concern over the SSEU, and even Edith Abbott, a valued former Hull-House resident and professor of public welfare of the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, feared that “if Hull-House signed such a [SSEU] contract it would give great impetus to the organization [sic] movement, the usefulness of which has not been demonstrated, and would definitely align Hull-House with one faction in the dispute.”[129] Carr was given the authority to continue talks with the union groups and was successful in getting the approval of the trustees for the SSEU, the union that staff had organized. Essie Soffen, a Hull-House resident who began as Carr’s secretary but eventually became her administrative secretary, was elected chair of the union.[130] Leah Dickinson, an administrator under Carr, was also a SSEU member. This mix of waitresses and secretaries with individuals like Soffen and Dickinson, who were “executives,” caused another resident, Donna Hodgman, to observe that “one had the feeling that the majority of those at the [SSEU] meetings were equipped with two masks, which they changed to fit the needs of the moment. One of course expressed loyalty and sense of responsibility to Miss Carr, to Mrs. Bowen . . . [and] the other mask, equally obviously, expressed our devotion to the welfare, particularly the economic welfare, of The People . . . the maids and janitors plus a very few office workers.”[131] Hodgman felt that the white-collar workers identified chiefly with the administration seldom seemed to feel that they had any problems; instead, “it was the maids and janitors whose problems were usually under discussion.”[132]

Carr was eager to move quickly to implement a new approach to the education and support of workers. Hull-House had been influential in the early days of trade union organization, especially among garment workers. Addams, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and Edith and Grace Abbott championed protective legislation for women and children; they advocated a variety of welfare measures to establish what they believed was a humane standard of living for workers in the United States. Addams also was concerned about the psychological and intergenerational problems of immigrants, who she perceived experienced a combination of alienation, loss of parental authority, and inability to control the damaging influences to their children from the popular culture. Carr had a different approach to working-class culture, one that was expressed by the Left’s embrace of worker-initiated cultural production.

Carr caused conflict when she took aim at an iconic Hull-House institution: the Labor Museum. Established by Jane Addams in 1900, the Labor Museum was an attempt to present industrialization in an historic light for the benefit of workers in the neighborhood—factory laborers and immigrants whose European crafts were no longer relevant. Live

demonstrations of crafts by neighbors who were encouraged to wear the dress of their native lands, classes in crafts offered in an effort an intergenerational understanding and sharing, and displays on the walls and in cabinets illustrating sequential stages of production, were all part of the settlement’s effort to historicize and valorize working-class experiences. To Carr these performances were antiquated and had little to do with the realities of working-class life. When Carr suggested that the looms and other equipment in the textile or weaving room “be put in some institution or museum, and the space used as a center for working men,” the old guard trustees had to agree that the weaving room was not used very much. Carr, however, had to negotiate this change with the residents, who seemed more attached to the old weaving room, which had been the center of the Labor Museum.[133] Carr was anxious to use the space to provide specialized labor and legal aid service. A digest of labor law had been prepared by one of the Hull-House residents and was being reviewed by the Department of Labor. Carr hoped to distribute it as part of the legal aid service.

The major workers’ project under Carr was Workers’ Education, which was a new department. It included citizenship, English, and workers’ education courses, and its program offered seventy-two classes with an attendance of 1,456. A weekly forum was established and two persons were employed to do industrial research work, to gather factual material and statistics as ammunition for civic campaigns. Clearly, Carr saw the department as having a significant political role in advocating for workers’ rights and benefits.

In addition to creating more space for workers’ education of a political nature, during Carr’s administration the industrial shops were retooled and technical education updated. For example, in 1937, the National Youth Administration (NYA) established a machine-work class Hull-House, equipped with machines and lathes, and supervised by NYA and WPA people. In return for furnishing electricity, space, and materials, Hull-House would have the benefit of whatever work was done.[134]

Carr gathered an impressive staff to develop the Workers’ Education department. Jess Ogden was committed to the idea that permeated the Federal Theatre Project and Workers’ Education in the 1930s—using theater for workers’ education and for social change. Alice Treleavan, who had been employed by the Adult Education Project of the WPA teaching workers’ education at Chicago Commons, had left that position to work at Hull-House.

Residents at Hull-House eagerly awaited her arrival: “I heard that soon [1937] we were going to have a wonderful teacher, the best anyone had ever seen, Alice Treleavan, on our new staff,” Hodgman wrote. “She would show us how to teach. If it were possible she would put life into our dull, staid brains so we would teach the people how to help themselves. Or, at any rate, we would teach them all about trade unions.”[135] Jerry Ingersoll, a Dartmouth College graduate, developed classes in civics and labor problems. Mary Wing assisted the Workers’ Education Program as Research Assistant and Librarian. Leah Dickinson, an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers who had six years’ experience in settlements—Kinsley House in Pittsburgh, and Christadora and Union settlements in New York—was Charlotte Carr’s assistant.[136]

Carr’s tenure with Hull-House ended in December 1942, after only five years; according to Carr, she had been fired.[137] There were charges of budget extravagance under Carr’s administration, and in a newspaper interview, Louise Bowen, president of the board, admitted that Carr’s political activities were a problem.[138] Another unnamed board member pointed out that the budget at the end of 1942 had been balanced for the first time in six years, with larger contributions than ever before[139] and the record indicates that there was no budget crisis.[140] Bowen did not articulate what arguably was Carr’s real sin: successful efforts at organization and empowerment of the neighborhood. This would have been threatening in itself, but Carr believed that the neighborhood people must participate fully in the affairs of the settlement. She saw Hull-House as the community’s organization. This effort to curtail the authority of Charlotte Carr marked a turning point in the settlement’s role in the neighborhood. “Miss Carr’s departure, it was learned today,” a newspaper article reported, was the signal for a long-standing controversy between the Hull House directorate and the Hull House customers to come to focus in the form of these three demands on the former by the latter:

1. Representation by bona fide residents of the neighborhood where [sic] the historic old settlement house does business on the board.

2. Recognition of a management committee made up of church, businessmen’s and similar groups in the neighborhood.

3. A voice in the selection of Miss Carr’s successor.[141]

None of the demands was met.

Carr’s boldness in attempting to bring the residents of the neighborhood into the settlement as partners in determining the direction of Hull-House, political columnist Sydney J. Harris argued, “often antagonized some board members, as did her insistence upon entering political controversies when she felt the welfare of ‘the little people was at stake.’”[142] Carr believed that she, as director of Hull-House, represented the little people against the special interests.

While many people who agreed with her approach liked to say she was carrying out the legacy of Jane Addams, Carr was attempting something very different from the kind of social relations Addams established with the neighborhood. Commenting on the departure of Carr, a member of the West Side Community Committee, who had spent his life in the neighborhood, said the fundamental issue was “who shall formulate the policies of Hull House? Does Hull House belong to the people it serves, or to the trustees? Shall it be an ‘agency’ superimposed from above; or shall it be an instrument of the people themselves? Only by involving the people significantly in the management of Hull House can it ever become a real part of the attitudes, sentiments and thinking of the people.”[143] He continued: “Because Charlotte Carr was thoroughly familiar with conditions as they are, and was in complete accord with our aspirations for democracy, we consider her resignation an irreparable loss to our community. And we hope that the trustees will reconsider it.”[144]

The trustees were not ready to transform the settlement into the kind of community organization envisioned by Carr and elements of the community who were ready to take on a leadership role in the neighborhood’s future.

During Charlotte Carr’s short tenure as Hull-House director there was a shift toward a more conservative board that interfered in the details of settlement life more and more.[145] Perhaps the changes reflected efforts to address the increasingly difficult task of raising money for the settlement, or from a sense that the board had to assume the responsibility of policy-making now that the director was “hired help.” There were also the new pressures from Chicago’s Council of Social Agencies and the reality that Hull-House had become less financially independent and even began applying for funds from the Community Fund of Chicago for a small, but sought-after portion of its budget.[146] Bowen, who was the president and treasurer of the Hull House Association, frequently found herself consulting with the Council of Social Agencies of Chicago. The group assessed how social agencies were performing and, while separate from the Community Fund, was influential in whether or not an agency obtained requested funds. These consultations included discussions about whether or not the director at the settlement should be part or full-time, paid or volunteer; on the state of programs and staffing; and on its annual budget. Shortfalls were to be funded, if approved by the Council, by the Community Fund. The budget committee of the Council reviewed whether private fundraising by the trustees was adequate or should be increased.[147] This new world of regulations and boundaries differed vastly from the earlier time when Addams had tried to avoid formalism of any kind and had balked at the insistence by a major donor that the loosely organized association become a not-for-profit entity under state law.[148]

The Community Fund allocations were never so substantial that control by the Hull-House board was ever in jeopardy. But for many years the settlement’s investments and endowments had been “looted” to pay for operating costs and repairs of the old buildings. This practice worried the business-minded trustees. At the same time, the aging Bowen personally felt the pressures to continue fundraising and probably sought other wealthy folk whom she knew to help shoulder the burden. To facilitate this effort, in January of 1942 the number of trustees was increased to twenty-five.[149] Bowen’s influence in who came on the board was key here. When old-timers died, they had been replaced by other family members or individuals well known to Bowen and those on the board. Charles Hull Ewing “replaced” his cousin, Helen Culver; Bowen added her daughter Helen Bowen Blair in 1929. That year the by-laws were revised to allow an increase of trustees from seven to nine.[150] This tradition of balancing any “new blood” on the board with a safe amount of “old blood” continued well into the 1960s. The old blood included good old boy investment bankers and businessmen[151] with close social or kinship relations to Bowen and her daughter, and a sprinkling of Hull-House “families.” The latter included individuals whose connections went back to the Jane Addams’s years, such as Charles P. Schwartz, her attorney, and William F. Deknatel whose father, Frederick, had been at Hull-House in the 1900s. Trustees also included Professor Harrison Dobbs, Dr. Arthur Todd, and Wayne C. McMillen—academics who represented the social policy and social work establishment; and a sprinkling of social feminists like Grace Abbott and Adena Miller Rich who, in the Progressive Era had dominated the leadership ranks of Hull-House as independent-minded residents but, in the New Deal Era, did not appear to hold the balance of power. There were also a number of clubwomen from Chicago’s North Shore elite communities, but these women were not like the social activists of the women’s political culture during the Progressive Era. Marshall Field, III, joined the board in 1941. His progressive politics and funding of radical causes, including PM, the innovative Leftist tabloid, distinguished him from the other businessmen on the board. Samuel Levin, who came on the board at the end of 1942—but too late to save Charlotte Carr—was one of the founders of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and, in the 1940s, was head of the Illinois CIO.[152]

In addition, the board of trustees had attempted to limit Carr’s powers to develop programs and define policy. The Hull-House trustees publicly claimed that the reason for Carr’s “resignation” was a conflict over the budget. Carr, they contended, was unwilling to accept the budget cuts the trustees insisted were necessary and she was unwilling to accept any changes in policy or programs.[153] But there was more involved. Bowen and a group of trustees were attempting to rein in Carr and have control over the direction of the settlement. A pro-Carr trustee, Mary Wing, had offered to take care of the budget shortfall and to pay the salary of a fundraiser, as well as to pay a pro-rated amount of the current deficit at any time within the year that the budget was exceeded, if she was given the assurance that Carr would have control of policy and program decisions. After initially accepting Wing’s offer at the board meeting December 1, 1942, the personnel and budget committee, seemingly on its own initiative, sent all the trustees a resolution that accepted Wing’s underwriting offer but also included the condition “that no changes in personnel or activities involving other or different money expenditures than those provided for in the budget, be made by the Director without the approval of the [board] president or the chairman of the budget and personnel committee being first obtained.” Wing protested this resolution and threatened to rescind her offer and submit her resignation if it was passed. She questioned the power of the personnel and budget committee to submit resolutions counter to the action the board had previously taken and considered the substitute resolution to be a vote of no confidence in Carr. The substitute resolution passed at the next board meeting, December 21, and Wing resigned, precipitating Carr’s resignation.[154] Alex Elson, a lawyer who was a newly elected trustee (and who had attended Hull-House as a youngster and young adult) found Bowen’s board to be “very controlled.” After his initial term, he was not asked back, but “was elected again after the War” when Bowen had retired as president.[155]

Without the influence of the social reform agenda initiated by the women’s political culture of the Progressive Era to provide a framework, and in the absence of her great mentor Jane Addams, Bowen seemed unable to make the change that others made when they saw the New Deal as the fulfillment of many of the goals of the earlier reform era. These individuals included Hull-House former residents Grace and Edith Abbott, Adena Miller Rich, Dr. Alice Hamilton, and Sophonisba Breckinridge; Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor who had ties to Hull-House and the settlement movement; Helen Hall of New York’s Henry Street Settlement, and Lea Taylor of Chicago Commons.[156] The New Deal revitalization under Charlotte Carr did not launch a second rebirth of the social settlement movement nationwide,[157] nor did it solve the problems that Hull-House faced after World War II. Carr did revamp the settlement at a low moment and renewed its connection to political activism, racial justice, and labor advocacy. After Carr, Hull-House never lost its zeal for making a pluralistic, interracial democracy work, or its advocacy of improving the economic, educational, and cultural conditions of workers and eliminating poverty. Nor were Carr’s efforts to integrate Hull-House and to use the settlement to catalyze a new political power with the neighborhood people, abandoned. These goals were shared by Russell Ballard, who served as Hull-House director from 1943 to 1963, in a time of increased racial tensions in American cities, including Chicago. Then, however, with the demise of the New Deal and the solidification of a Cold War politics, there were fewer avenues to pursue progressive policies of racial liberalism and community redevelopment.

As this chapter has shown, by 1939, concerns about the political activities of Carr were coming from inside the settlement community and were being voiced by Hull-House trustees.[158] Carr clashed with Bowen when she used the reputation of the Hull-House settlement to advance the cause of the Democratic candidate for mayor, Edward J. Kelly.

The trustees were reflecting the growing polarization in politics that the liberal wing of the New Deal provoked from the defenders of capitalism who saw the specter of socialism in every relief or federal program proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There were more capitalists than either social workers or reformers on the Hull-House board, and, with the beginning of the United States involvement in World War II, there was a rejection of those who offered critiques of the American market system and supported a militant working class. The CIO signaled a form of radical labor organization, the vision of one big union, distinctly activist and embracing of the unskilled as well as the skilled, and black as well as white workers. As an ardent New Dealer and CIO-sympathizer, Carr’s politics took on a distinctly threatening tint to a number of trustees who may have taken their cues from Bowen, president of the board of trustees, who was an ardent supporter of Wendell Willkie’s candidacy for president in 1940.[159] Bowen led the opposition to Carr, arguing privately that the director’s public support of FDR and other politicians had cost Hull-House the loss of contributions from wealthy donors who no longer were willing to donate to the settlement because of its embrace of the New Deal.[160] Political columnist Sidney J. Harris summed up the dispute: “[W]hile some board members believed that as a ‘hired employee’ of Hull House, Miss Carr should reduce her political efforts in controversial issues. She, on the other hand, insisted that Hull House must take an active part in political affairs in order to obtain social and economic benefits for the neighborhood.”[161]

There were critics who did not understand how the settlement’s avowed claim to be nonsectarian, nonpartisan, and independent jibed with the actions of residents, including those who openly joined sides, advocated candidates, signed petitions and took controversial public stands. “Guilt by association” began long before the McCarthy Era; it was used against Hull-House and Addams in the 1900s, during the “Red Scare” after World War I, and in the assault against New Deal programs in the 1930s. But in the 1940s and 1950s, the chilling effects of loyalty oaths and Cold War diplomacy after the Atom bomb added a new dimension to the hysteria. Liberals and progressives internalized the fear and went along with the anti-Communism crusade. Charlotte Carr’s involvement with the CIO and the Left-wing elements of the old New Deal coalition that joined the Union for Democratic Action [later Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)] became, by the end of 1942, unacceptable.[162] The Cold War era had not officially begun. The House Un-American Activities Committee never summoned Carr, although the FBI kept a file on her. After leaving Hull-House, she became the assistant to the vice chairman of the War Manpower Commission in 1943 and, one year later, served as New York regional director of the Congress of Industrial Organizations Political Action Committee.[163] Active in welfare, housing, children’s and workers’ rights until the end of her life, her belief in a worker’s democracy never wavered.

[1]Carr received $6,000 a year at Hull House. She came to Hull House in 1937 from a $10,000 a year position with the New York City emergency relief bureau. “Deny Miss Carr’s Politics Caused Hull House Rift. Trustees Say Budget Row Led to Resignation.” Chicago Tribune, 4 January 1943, p. 11. Charlotte Carr, director of Hull-House, 1937-1942, graduated from Vassar in 1915 and pursued post-graduate studies in economics for three years at Columbia University. She held important positions with the New York State Charities Aid Association, the New York Charity Organization Society and other welfare groups. For six years she was in charge of personnel work in factories. In the New York State Department of Labor Carr worked with Frances Perkins, later Secretary of Labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She was in charge of research work relating to problems of women and children in industry, also problems arising from the administration and extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Law. Many of the results of surveys made by Carr were incorporated in the legislative programs of Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, and President Roosevelt when the latter was Governor of New York. The reputation Carr won by her work caused Gifford Pinchot, while Governor of Pennsylvania, to request Perkins to lend Miss Carr to the Pennsylvania State Department of Labor. While she was serving the State of Pennsylvania Carr’s leave was extended several times. She established in the Pennsylvania Labor Department a bureau of women and children similar to the New York bureau, and later became its director. Miss Carr returned to New York City in 1929 to become industrial consultant of the Charity Organization Society, with which she remained until 1930. She also was appointed to the Commission on Unemployment Relief set up by Governor Lehman, with Allen Wardwell as chairman. Mr. Knauth and Mr. Corsi induced Mr. Wardwell to permit Miss Carr to serve as assistant director of the Home Relief Division.” “Corsi Gets Post As Aide To Hodson,” New York Times, 20 July 1935, p. 3.

[2]S. J. Woolf, “Miss Carr Takes a Social Ideal to Hull House,” New York Times Magazine (August 8, 1937): 5.

[3] Trustees’ Meeting Minutes, January 21, 1938, 4, Folder 5, Hull House Collection, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago Library (hereafter, HHC).

[4] Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York & London: Verso, 1997).

[5] Addams, the daughter of an Illinois State Senator and businessman who died in 1881, inherited a portion of his estate and was able to restore the old Hull home’s interior and contribute to the settlement budget, albeit with contributions from others, until about 1895. Addams was clearly a privileged woman who did not need to work; she was not, however, rich, as attested to the small amount of property and outright cash she had at the time of her death. See: “3 Share $11,933 Divided In Will of Jane Addams.” Chicago Tribune, 26 October 1937, p. 20.

[6] The one exception to this is the relationship she had with Helen Culver; the incorporation of Hull-House in 1895 was a condition imposed by Culver before she would make a permanent relationship with Addams who, from 1889, had leased the house and had negotiated for each new lot for the expansion of the complex. Allen B. Pond to Helen Culver, April 18, 1906. JAMC Reel 4-1331. See also: Jane Addams Memorial Collection correspondence, 1889, reel 2. Letters to landlord Helen Culver from Jane Addams in March 1890. Through the early years Addams struggles to get Culver to donate rent and eventually more buildings, finally convincing her after several years to offer some of the lots on the block for sale. See especially letter from Jane Addams to “Dearest” (Mary Rozet Smith) March 23, 1898, JAMC reel 2.

[7] John F. Lyons, “Adena Miller Rich,” Women Building Chicago, 743. Residents Eileen Duggan, Clara Stahl, and Esther Kokn, who was chair of the residents, asked for a joint meeting with the Hull-House board of trustees to defer action on Rich’s resignation that had been submitted March 19, 1937. Duggan, Stahl & Kohn to Louise Bowen, March 29, 1937.

[8] “People Live at Hull-House, Part 2: Paint It White,” 2.

[9] John F. Lyons, “Adena Miller Rich,” Women Building Chicago, 743.

[10] Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Judith Trolander, Professionalism and Social Change: From the Settlement House Movement to Neighborhood Centers 1886 to the Present(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

[11] Lasch-Quinn, Trolander, and Bryan and Davis treat this period but have an incomplete understanding of the 1930s and 1940s at Hull-House.

[12] Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

[13] There is no biography of Carr and she left no personal papers. See: (“Charlotte Carr, Relief Aide, Dies,” New York Times, 13 July 1956, p. 19; “Hits Fear Motive In Training Young,” New York Times, 13 June 1930; Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Labor and Industry, Charlotte E. Carr, secretary, Report to Governor Gifford Pinchot by the Commission on Special Policing in Industry. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1934, in Folder 543, Hull House Collection, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.

[14] Dorothy Height, Open Wide The Freedom Gates (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2003) 54.

[15] “Friends Give Farewell Fete for New Hull House Head,” Chicago Defender, 2 October 1937, p. 7. The invited guests included Robert Elzy, founder of the Urban League in Brooklyn, New York; Dr. Channing Tobias, an executive with the YMCA, Bessye Beardon, Harlem civic leader and mother of the artist Romare Beardon; James B. Hubert of the New York Urban League, A. Philip Randolph, and T. Arnold Hill.

[16] Articles in the Chicago Defender about the club never identify its being all black as a problem and there were also reports that when national associations of African American women held their meetings in Chicago, the Hull-House settlement was a sought-after venue for part or all of the programs. This brings up the whole question of how in a segregated society a White institution like Hull-House could promote respect and acceptance of a black-only group; in this case anti-discrimination meant being willing to let African American community groups share space with Whites.

[17] Hull-House Year Book Forty-Second Year, 1931-32, 43; “One afternoon a month all of the women who have afternoon classes at the House and in periods of unemployment the men as well, have an afternoon social at which refreshments are served and a special program is carried out. The last celebration of Washington’s Birthday was especially successful both for its historical presentation and its air of jollity. The group of women represented Mexicans, Italians, Greeks, Bohemians, Germans and Lithuanians.” (Hull-House Year Book, Fortieth Year, 1930, 27;Hull-House Year Book, Forty-Fifth year, 44, 35; Donna Hodgman, “Wide Interest Shown In Revival of Greek Club,” Hull-House Block News, Jan. 27, 1939, Vol. II, no. 7, 2; HHA Records, Scrapbooks-Press Clippings, Folder 523, West Side Times, 9-13-51; “Next Fifty Years at Hull House Are Mapped by Charlotte Carr,” New York Herald Tribune, 18 March 1940.

[18] Nesta Smith, who taught string instruments at Hull-House let slip that “these new groups [Mexicans, blacks] that came in were culturally of a much lower level to work with. You see, they didn’t come with the kind of culture back of them that the Italians and the Jewish people and the Greeks did. Besides the blacks that we got mostly were the southern blacks that migrated . . . and, morally and culturally and everything, they didn’t have back of them what these other groups did. So it was quite a turn over . [when] . . . most of our old reliable European families were moving out.” Nesta Smith,, OH-019, p. 10, [interviewed by Babette E. Munson], January 19, 1982] Box 5, Folder 76, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago Library.

[19] Jessie Lloyd O’Connor, “Outlaw Restrictive Covenants.” Hull-House Block News, 2, no. 22 (May 12, 1939): 4-5.

[20] In searching the records to verify whether or not Dewey E. Jones and his family were truly the first African Americans in residence at Hull-House, I want to mention two findings: the first is the “informal” residence of Harriet Rice in the 1890s and 1900s. Rice, an African American physician, is never formally listed as a resident, yet there is considerable correspondence that indicates she participated in the settlement, was a physician in the clinic, worked in the branch library and the coffee-house, briefly, and presented a worrisome problem for Addams and her intimate friend, Mary Rozet Smith. See: Louise Knight, “Rice, Harriet Alleyne,” in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 741. The artist Lawrence Arthur Jones, when he was attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), lived at Hull-House and taught art classes, probably in one of the WPA programs. This was probably for no more than a year or two. Records of residents are so incomplete that it is not that surprising to not find him listed. No one at Hull-House contradicted Carr when she claimed that Dewey E. Jones was the first resident who was African American, even though there were residents around who must have known that Lawrence Jones lived at Hull-House. My guess is that he really did not engage fully, for whatever reasons, in the residential community, but lived at the settlement, taught some classes, and was a student at SAIC. February 26, 1937 report, pp. 1-2, Adena Miller Rich Papers, Folder 13, Special Collections, UIC; Cheryl R. Ganz, “Shaping Clay, Shaping Lives: The Hull-House Kilns” in Pots of Promise 75. On the other hand, Lawrence Jones is credited with designing the logo for the new Hull-House newspaper, Octagon, launched during the head residency of Adena Miller Rich.

[21] “Dewey Jones to Join Hull House Staff.” Chicago Defender, March 19, 1938, pg. 2.

[22] Harold Ickes, a Chicagoan with close ties to Hull-House and Jane Addams, had served as president of the local chapter of the NAACP. The Left-leaning New Deal networks had begun to include the black bourgeoisie; Hull-House was one of the connecting links in this new infrastructure, bringing blacks and whites together. Later on Robert E. Weaver, who also worked with Ickes, would live at Hull-House while he served as director of Community Services of the American Council on Race Relations in Chicago. Russell W. Ballard to the Board of Trustees, HHA, January 27, 1947, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum.

[23] Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America 1925-1945. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001, 126-142.

[24] Chicago Defender, Feb. 24, 1940, 15; Mrs. Lillian Summers became a HH resident in July 1939. She was the district superintendent of the Family Service Bureau, United Charities, at the South Central District office. She was very well known in civic and social work circles in Chicago and actively participated in a number of community organizations. She was the president of the Chicago Council of the National Negro Congress; the Negro People’s Theatre; she was part of the Public Relations Committee of the American Association of Social Workers; she participated in the National Youth Congress, Chicago Urban League, Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, the Citizens School Committee and was on the board of directors of the Good Shepherd Community Center. She lived in the women’s quarters at Hull-House. Hull-House Block News, vol. III, no. 4, June 23, 1939, 5.

[25] “Social Worker Succeeds Late Dewey Jones.” Chicago Defender, May 27, 1939, 19.

[26]

[27] Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, 14.

[28] Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 14.

[29] “The Chicago Urban League Holds Annual Conference.” Chicago Defender, Sept. 25, 1937, 19.

[30] Other leaders involved in the Bowen Country Club conference included Lillian Summers, Robert R. Taylor, Saul D. Alinsky, Horace Cayton, Dr. Curtis Reese, Jessie Binford, Faith Jones, Dr. Rachel Yarros, Ferd Krammer, Wilfred Reynolds, and Mary Herrick. “The Chicago Urban League Holds Annual Conference.” Chicago Defender, Sept. 25, 1937, 19.

[31] “Dewey E. Jones Report, Minutes, March 15, 1939, Executive Committee, Division on Education and Recreation, TMs, 7-9, Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers. Box 145, Folder 1: Minorities. Chicago History Museum, quoted in Bryan and Davis, 100 Years At Hull-House, 230-231.

[32] Dewey E. Jones Report, quoted in Bryan and Davis, 232.

[33] See Hull-House Collection, Series X. Publications, Folders 434-442, Spec. Coll. & UA, ULUIC.

[34] Jones’s editorship of the Hull-House Yearbook was noted by the Black press: “Then there is the first [sic] annual Year Bookof Hull House, in the preface of which Miss Charlotte Carr, headworker, gives complete credit to Dewey Roscoe Jones, former managing editor of the Chicago Defender, for editing the book. It is a masterpiece of production and information—and laurels to Miss Carr for knowing her staff talent, using it, and giving credit where credit is due. I know some establishments that would not have given the opportunity; and others, if the opportunity had been given would have hidden the facts. America needs more Charlotte Carrs . . . . “ (Nahum Daniel Brascher,” A Little Light Along the Way. Random Thoughts.” Chicago Defender, April 8, 1939, pg. 15.)

[35] Jones received his A.B. degree in journalism from the University of Michigan; in 1923 he became a reporter for the Chicago Defender, then city editor, and later managing editor of that paper. He had a column, “Lights and Shadows” for many years. With A Rosenwald Fellowship, Jones studied journalism at Columbia University, and obtained a M.S. degree. While in NYC he wrote for the Amsterdam News. Frank L. Hayes, “Dewey R. Jones Dies; Assistant at Hull House,” Chicago Daily News, April 11, 1939, 6; David W. Kellum, “Death Claims Dewey R. Jones; Journalist is Buried After Simple Rites; Loses Fight With Death After Illness of Nine Days,” Chicago Defender, April 15, 1939, 1.

[36] Dewey E. Jones Report, Minutes, March 15, 1939, Executive Committee, Division on Education and Recreation, TMs, 7-9, Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers. Box 145, Folder 1: Minorities. Chicago History Museum, quoted in Bryan and Davis, 232.

[37] Dewey E. Jones Report, quoted in Bryan and Davis, 232.

[38] “Spring Festival at Hull House To Open May 16,” Chicago Tribune, May 4, 1941, pg. W5.

[39] D. Hodgman, “Part 4: The People,” 23. Liquor was not served at Hull-House before the Carr administration. Addams and Bowen remained unchanging in their support of prohibition. Carr, on the other hand, enjoyed her martinis and smoked cigarettes in the residents’ dining room and her private quarters.

[40] D. Hodgman, “Part 4. The People,” 23.

[41] D. Hodgman, “Part 4. The People,” 23-24.

[42] D. Hodgman, “Part 4. The People,” 25.

[43] D. Hodgman, “Part 4. The People,” 25.

[44] D. Hodgman, “Part 4. The People,” 26.

[45] “No Color Line Here,” Chicago Defender, 7 June 1941, p. 11; coverage of the same event in the Chicago Tribune did not mention the interracial nature of the event. “Spring Fete, Tribute to Jane Addams, to Be Opened Today,” Chicago Tribune, 16 May 1941, p. 23.

[46]Gaines transcript

[47] Hull-House At the Fiftieth Year, May 1940.

[48] “Miss Carr Meets With Representative Leaders,” Hull-House Block News, 2, no. 22 (May 12, 1939): 3-4.

[49] Those present were Carr; Earl Dickerson, Alderman of the Second Ward and chairman of the Board of Directors of the Chicago Urban League; S.B. Danley, District Manager of the Illinois State Employment Service; Dean Smith, director of the Chicago Baptist Institute; Ishmael Floury, secretary-treasurer of the Joint Council of the Dining Car Employees; George McCray, Executive Secretary of the National Negro Congress, Chicago Council, and Rosenwald Fellow; St. Clair Drake, Research Assistant on the Study of the Chicago Negro Community, directed by Horace C. Cayton and W. Lloyd Warner; Miss Pauline Redmond, director of Youth Work for the Chicago Urban League; Mrs. Faith Jones, of the Chicago Relief Administration; Horace R. Cayton, Co-director of the Study of the Chicago Negro Community; Dr. Walter Adams, psychiatrist at Provident Hospital; Miss Mary Wing, research secretary at Hull-House; A.L. Foster, executive secretary of the Chicago Urban League; Mrs. Helen Howard, Industrial Secretary of the South Parkway Branch of the YWCA; John A. Sengstacke, manager, the Chicago Defender; Mrs. Irene McCoy Gaines, president, Northern District Association of Colored Women; Sydney Jones, chair of the South Side Forum; the Reverend Harold M. Kingsley, pastor of Good Shepherd Congregational Church; Joy Schultz, research assistant on the Study of the Chicago Negro Community.

[50] Cayton is an important figure. An African American who had one foot in academe and the other in social activism as the director of the South Parkway Branch of the YMCA, he links the emerging social work community, the settlement houses, and the City of Chicago’s race relations commissions & committees. See: Jeffrey Helgeson, “Striving in Black Chicago: Migration, Work, and the Politics of Neighborhood Change 1935-1965,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2008, 130-191. Cayton, with St. Clair Drake, authored Black Metropolis (1945), the now-classic account of the black community in Chicago.

[51] Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 140-41;138-42.

[52] “Hearings on Race’s Status Set Jan. 3, 4,” Chicago Defender, 28 December 1940, p. 15.

[53] With the death of children’s drama director Edith de Nancrede in 1936, the retirement of Enella Benedict in 1937, who had directed the art school from its beginnings in the 1890s, and the closing of the Hull-House Kilns that same year (a project directed by Myrtle Merritt French from 1927 to 1937), the stage was set for significant changes.[53] See biographies of Enella Benedict and Edith de Nancrede in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast.(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), and Ganz and Strobel, Pots of Promise, 55-86, for a discussion of Myrtle Merritt French. For an assessment of Nancrede’s significance as well as the affection her students felt for her see: Nicolette Malone Oral Interview transcript, OH-076, [interviewed by Stuart J. Hecht, March 10, 1980, Part I,11.

[54] Amalie Hannig, “Christmas at Hull-House,” The Ladies Home Journal 28, no. 17 (December 1911): 31.

[55] Hilda Satt Polacheck, I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989),103.

[56] Donna Hodgman, “Wide Interest Shown in Revival of Greek Club,” Hull-House Block News, Jan. 27, 1939, vol. II, no. 7, 2. Chicago Commons continued to present Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” but began to plan a “nationality” Christmas custom program in addition that would portray Italian, Polish, Mexican and Greek Christmases. “Minutes,” January 14, 1939, Folder 235, Graham Taylor Papers, Newberry Library.

[57] Madge C. Jenison, “A Hull House Play,” The Atlantic Monthly 98 (July 1906): 83-92; Edith de Nancrede. “Dramatic Work at Hull-House,” Neighborhood 1, no. 1 (January 1928): 23-28.

[58] Shannon Jackson, “Civic Play-Housekeeping: Gender, Theatre, and American Reform,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3, Enacting America(n)s (Oct. 1996), 353. This article reflects on the socialization and reform aspects of the drama/social clubs at Hull-House.

[59] We are fortunate to have oral interviews from several individuals who spent many years actively engaged in the social clubs/drama productions at Hull-House. Their comments reveal the degree of socialization and preparation for achievement and assimilation in American society provided by the Hull-House program in theater. Ida Werner Oral Interview transcript, OH-012 [Interviewed by Evelyn Crawford Smith] April 23, 1982, 15; Eleanor Carroll Farwell Oral History transcript, OH-052 [Interviewed by Mary Ann Johnson] July 14, 1981, 51; Dorothy Sigel Oral Interview transcript, OH-071 [interviewed by Stuart J. Hecht] July 12, 1981, 6.

[60] George J. Mavigliano and Richard A. Lawson, The Federal Art Project in Illinois 1935-1943 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 22.

[61] Commemorative booklet, Eleanor Roosevelt dedication of the South Side Community Art Center, May 7, 1941, William McBride Papers, Box 3, Chicago Public Library.

[62] William F. Deknatel is a central figure in the post-1935 history of Hull-House. He was the son of Frederick H. Deknatel, a prosperous hardware manufacturer, who had come to the settlement around 1900 after the death of his first wife. Devoting himself to the community, he met Wilfreda Brockway, who was teaching in the kindergarten. They married and lived together at the settlement. William was their son. As a young man William was one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s students. Later on he taught design in the Hull-House Art School, and, during the Carr years served as a trustee and close advisor, a position he continued when Russell Ballard became director. In the crucial years from 1947 to 1963 he was the most influential trustee serving as chairman of the Near West Side Planning Board, as president of the Hull-House board of trustees. “William F. Deknatel,” Chicago Tribune, 18 February 1973, p. B18.) HHA Records 9 November 1909; Minutes, April 29, 1949, Folder 13, Series 1 Hull-House Collection.

[63] See. Mavigliano and Lawson, The Federal Art Project in Illinois.

[64] William F. Deknatel to Charlotte Carr, July 7, 1939, Folder 37, Hull House Collection.

[65] Emily Edwards to Miss Norma K. Stahle, General Secretary, Association of Arts & Industries, January 23, 1940, Folder 37, Hull House Collection.

[66] Edwards, Deknatel’s cousin, had studied under Enella Benedict at SAIC and at that time (1906) taught art classes at Hull-House; in the 1920s she studied with Diego Rivera, became expert in the Mexican mural tradition, writing on the subject, but returned to Chicago in the late 1930s, joined the HH art school staff in 1937, and resided in the settlement. Hull House Octagon, 2, no. 1 (December 20, 1936),2.

[67] Charlotte Carr to William Deknatel, Baymeath, Bar Harbor, Maine, July 10, 1939, Folder 37, Hull House Collection; Melting Pot, April 1941, vol. 1, No. 2, pg. 2, Folder 471, Hull House Collection.

[68] Minutes of Hull-House Art Center Staff Meeting, Friday October 3, 1941, Hoeckner in attendance and listed as the Chairman of the Committee on Teaching Personnel; William Deknatel, untitled typed manuscript, n.d., pg.1. Hull House Collection, Folder 386; Correspondence from February 1940 that lists Edward Millman as Senior Staff at Hull-House Center and Design Workshops; Bernece Berkman is listed under attendance for a meeting at the Hull-House Art Center Staff Meeting, Friday, October 3, 1940.

[69] “Outdoor Lights Help Programs at Hull-House.” Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1938, pg. W2.

[70] In an article describing a Negro Art Exhibit at Howard University, Washington, D.C., there is mention in the description of artist Eldzier Cortor that he had exhibited his work at the Hull-House gallery, as well as other places. “Howard Art Gallery Exhibits Works of Nationally Known Young Artists,” Chicago Defender, April 29, 1939, 5. This may be referring to the Benedict Gallery exhibit of July 1938.

[71] Eleanor Jewett, “Review Books; art critic reads about herself.” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 29, 1939, pg. F4; C. J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries.” Chicago Daily News, Nov. 4, 1939, n.p.

[72] Bulliet, “Around the Galleries.”

[73] Willard F. Motley, “Negro Art in Chicago.” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, January, 1940, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, 19; Motley had moved into the Near West Side neighborhood in 1938 and was one of three aspiring writers who launched the Hull-House Magazine in November 1939.

[74] Motley, “Negro Art In Chicago.” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, January, 1940, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, 19.

[75] Motley, “Negro Art In Chicago,” 19.

[76] Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46 (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press,1999),75.

[77] Mullen, Popular Fronts, 80.

[78] See Hull-House Collection, Series X. Publications, Folders 434-442, Spec. Coll. & UA, ULUIC.

[79] It is intriguing to note that between 1933 and 1939, no bulletins or yearbooks are published; the Octagon has a short life—only a few issues exist. .

[80] Hull-House Magazine, vol. 1, nos. 1-3, 1939-1940, Hull House Collection, Series X, Folder 469, Spec. Coll. & UA, ULUIC.

[81] Alexander Saxton, OH-095, 4.

[82] Willard Motley’s biographer Robert Fleming writes that Archibald Motley, Jr., was Willard’s brother; Amy M. Mooney more recently claims that Willard and Archibald Motley, Jr., were cousins. In the forward to Mooney’s book, Art historian David C. Driskell refers to Willard Motley as Archibald Motley, Jr.’s nephew. Robert E. Fleming, Willard Motley (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 15; Amy M. Mooney, Archibald J. Motley Jr (San Francisco: Pomegrante,2004), 83; vi.

[83] See the discussion of the young Willard Motley’s career in Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46 (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press,1999), 137.

[84] Motley (1909-1965) published his first short story, “Sister and Brother,” in the Chicago Defender in 1922 when he was thirteen. He wrote short articles for the Children’s Page of the Chicago Evening Post, in 1923, and from 1922 he edited Bud Billiken columns for the Chicago Defender. (Bud Billiken was the young Willard Motley’s pen name and developed into a public persona Motley graduated from Englewood High School, Chicago, in 1929; he rode to New York City on a bicycle that year. Attempting to launch his career as a writer, for the next five years he submitted short stories to Colliers, Liberty, Chicago Times, New York Daily News, but none were accepted for publication. Between 1936 and 1938 he made two trips West by automobile, spending a month in jail in Cheyenne, Wyoming. These adventures were the grist for travel articles which he published between 1938 and 1940. In 1939, Motley moved to an apartment at Fourteenth and Union streets, Chicago, the old Maxwell Street neighborhood that was located south and east of the Hull-House settlement. That year he began his association with a group of residents at the settlement. Motley, Alexander Saxton, and William Schenk edited three issues of the Hull-House Magazine. In 1940 Motley began working on the novel, “Leave Without Illusions” which was published in 1947 as Knock on Any Door. In 1940 Motley began to write for the Federal Writers’ Project. Motley published three more books: We Fished All Night (1951) and Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1958) and Let Noon Be Fair, published posthumously in 1966. Motley had moved to Mexico in 1951 and died there in 1965. Robert E. Fleming, Willard Motley (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 13-14.

[85] Mullen, Popular Fronts, 136.

[86] Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 136. Mullen writes: “Eager to document the conditions of the Depression poor, Motley merged his fledgling short story techniques with reportage” and he published “In All the World, No Trip Like This!, his experience in a Laramie, Wyoming county jail after stealing gas for his car; and “Religion and the Handout” in Commonweal, about experiences in a soup kitchen; in 1938 & 1939 he published “The Boy” and “The Boy Grows Up,” in The Ohio Motorist. These were “nonfiction accounts of his encounters with Joe, a young Mexican American who was the inspiration for Nick Romano, Italian-American protagonist of Knock on any Door,” his first novel.

[87] Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 6.

[88] Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 7.

[89] Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 7.

[90] Hull-House Magazine, December 1939, Vol. I, No. II, 1.

[91] Hull-House Magazine, December 1939, Vol. I, No. II, 6.

[92] Hull-House Magazine, January 1940, Vol. I, No. III,9; 11.

[93] Hull-House Magazine, December 1939, Vol. I, No. II, 11.

[94] Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 5.

[95] Hull-House Magazine, November 1939, Vol. 1, No. 1, 5.

[96] Jean Carter and Jess Ogden, Everyman’s Drama: A Study of the Noncommerical Theatre in the United States (New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1938), 66-67.

[97] D. Hodgman, “Paint It White,” 15.

[98] D. Hodgman, “Paint It White,” 15.

[99] D. Hodgman, “Paint It White,” 15.

[100] D. Hodgman, “Paint It White,” 15.

[101] D. Hodgman, “Paint It White,” 17.

[102] Halsted Streettypescript, 7.

[103] Halsted Streettypescript, 7.

[104] Minutes, April 19, 1939, Board of Trustees, HHA Records,

[105] D. Hodgman, “Paint It White, 17.

[106] D. Hodgman, “Paint It White, 18.

[107] D. Hodgman, “Paint It White, 19.

[108] Christopher Hodgman, M.D., “At Hull-House As A Boy, 1936-1942,” unpublished memoir, 2003.

[109] D. Hodgman, “The People,” 18.

[110] Ibid., p. 19. Ogden joined the Extension Program of the University of Virginia and worked in the field of Adult Education. He was also active in the community theatre movement.

[111] “Deny Miss Carr’s Politics Caused Hull House Rift. Trustees Say Budget Row Led to Resignation,” Chicago Tribune, 4 Jan. 1943, p. 11; “Charlotte Carr Will Head Hull House On Oct. 1,” Chicago Tribune, 16 July 1937, p. 20.

[112] Lea Taylor to Miss Helen Hall, Henry Street, April 14, 1939, Folder 2335, Graham Taylor Papers, The Newberry Library. See Michael Reisich and Janice Andrews, The Road Not Taken: A History of Radical Social Work in the United States (New York & London: Routledge, 2001), 39-60.

[113] Bowen to Reynolds, August 11, 1937, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum.

[114] Trustees’ Minutes January 21, 1938, HHC.

[115] Gutknect was known for his pro-labor attitude. Robert Morss Lovett, All Our Years. New York: The Viking Press, 1948, 234.

[116] Campaign Brochure: Vote for Gutknecht, Democratic Candidate for State’s Attorney, Primary, April 9, n.d, Folder 543, HHC.

[117] “Ickes Is Pressed To Run.” New York Times, 3 December 1938, p. 2. Among the score of signers were Professor Paul Douglas of the University of Chicago; G. L. Quilici, president of the Chicago Lawyers Guild; Lillian Herstein of the Chicago Teachers Union; W. E. Rodriquez and Henry Dwyer of the City Manager Committee; Abraham Plotkin of the International Ladies Garment Workers union; and Dr. Erich von Schroetter of the German-American League for Culture.

[118] “La Guardia Finds Chicago ‘New Deal,’” New York Times, 12 March 1939, p. 20.

[119] Bowen, as a member of an independent nonpartisan committee, did endorse Democrat Anton Cermak as the Chicago mayoral candidate in 1931. Years later, as an independent thinking Republican, Bowen supported Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, the newly nominated Democratic presidential candidate. Alter, “Louise deKoven Bowen,” In Women Building Chicago, 105.

[120] Quoted in Sharon Alter, “Louise deKoven Bowen,” Women Building Chicago, 105.

[121] Residency was a major function of the settlement house movement. It was a program that socialized hundreds of women and men from privileged and educated backgrounds and promoted ideas that we now associate with the liberal welfare state. Hull-house records on residency are incomplete, but minimally, there were 350 residents by 1930. My own research of residency at Hull-House from 1889 to 1963 lists more than 750 names, with varying amounts of biographical information. In 1935 there were 65 residents, of whom 45 were women and 20 were men, two were children; thirteen had arrived that fall; in 1939 there were over 100 residents; in 1943 there were 86 adults and 7 children; in 1946 there were 102 adults and 8 children. Hull-House Residents 1889-1929, Hull-House Collection, folder 294, Special Collections, Daley Library, UIC; Hull-House Year Book Forty-Fifth Year, 1934; “Report to Hull-House Trustees,” November 27, 1935, Adena Miller Rich Papers, Folder 17, Special Collections, Daley Library, UIC; Russell W. Ballard to the Board of Trustees, HHA, January 27, 1947, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum.

[122] See the following works to get an idea of settlement life: Francis Hackett, “Hull-House—A Souvenir,”Survey (June 1, 1925): 275-79; Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton (1943; reprint, with introduction by Jean Spencer Felton. OEM Press, 1995); Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis, eds., One Hundred Years at Hull-House [Revised, expanded edition of Eighty Years at Hull-House, 1969], Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Helen L. Horowitz, “Hull House as Women’s Space,” Chicago History, 12 (1983): 40-55; Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10 (Summer): 658-77; Eleanor J. Stebner, The Women of Hull House: A Study of Spirituality, Vocation, and Friendship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

[123] In 1923 she became assistant director of the State Labor Department’s bureau of women and industry (New York State); in 1925 she started a similar bureau for Pennsylvania. Dropped in 1929 for refusing to pay political assessments, she returned under Gov. Gifford Pinchot in 1931 as Deputy Secretary of Labor and Industry of Pennsylvania. In July 1933 she became Secretary, and served until the end of 1934. “Charlotte Carr, Relief Aide, Dies,” New York Times, 13 July 1956, p. 19.

[124] Trolander writes that at Hull-House after Jane Addams’s death, the settlement capitalized on its prestige by turning residence into a money-making program. Hull-House had an unusually large physical plant (it covered two city blocks), which included twenty-six apartments and at least twenty-seven rooms for residents. Rents ranged from $40 to $65 for apartments and $15 for rooms. These rentals supplied Hull-House with one-third of its income. Without Jane Addams to raise money, it became imperative to have as many people as possible living at the settlement. Hull-House began to solicit residents more openly and dropped the six-month probationary period. These efforts were successful; residence at Hull-House increased from around sixty-five in 1935, the year of Miss Addams’s death, to more than 100 in 1939. This businesslike approach attracted a more passive type of resident compared to those who initiated innovative programs in earlier years.” (Trolander, Settlement Houses, 45-46.)

[125] Trustees’ Meeting Minutes, February 24, 1938, Folder 5, Hull House Collection; Trustees’ Minutes, October 27, 1938. See also: Donna Hodgman, “People Live At Hull-House,” 1943, typescript, Jane Addams Memorial Collection (JAMC), Special Collections, Daley Library, UIC, to get a sense of the changing of the guard.

[126] Charlotte E. Carr, “Problem Communities.” Child Welfare Pamphlets, No. 74 (Iowa City: University of Iowa, February 24, 1940), 7-8, Folder 543, Hull House Collection.

[127] Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare 1890-1935(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 218-19.

[128] Trustees’ Minutes October 27, 1938.

[129] Trustees’ Minutes October 27, 1938.

[130] Donna Hodgman, “People Live at Hull-House: Paint It White,” (1943 typescript), 6. 13. Hull House Collection, Series VIII, Box 1, Folder557, Spec. Coll. & UA, ULUIC.

[131] Donna Hodgman, “People Live at Hull-House: The People,” 7-8.

[132] D. Hodgman, “The People,” 7-8.

[133] Trustees’ Minutes, January 21, 1938,

[134] HHA Trustees’ Meeting Minutes, December 10, 1937, Hull House Collection, Folder 5, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[135] D. Hodgman, “Paint it White,” p. 4.

[136] D. Hodgman, “Paint it White,” 4.

[137] http://tigger.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/urbanexp/main.cgi?file=new/subsub_index.ptt&chap=130. Accessed 2 July 2009. This is an article written by Alexander Gourse for Urban Experience: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods 1889-1963, an educational and research website edited by Rima Lunin Schultz for the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[138] “Jane Addams Spirit in Carr Background,” American, 26 December 1942, Folder 543, HHC.

[139] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job,” Chicago Daily News, 23 December 1942, p. 1; 4, Folder 543, HHC.

[140] Actually had a surplus, but still were faced with essential repairs; endowment was somewhat over $500,000; during 1943 they did not liquidate any endowment securities for current expenses. The increase in the value of the endowment fund came from higher market quotations for their railroad bonds and common stocks not because there were additions to the endowment in 1943. “Financial Statement Year Ended December 31, 1943,”HHA Trustees’ Annual Meeting, January 28, 1944, HHC.

[141] Hazel MacDonald, “Residents Ask for a Voice in Hull House,” Chicago Times, n.d., Near West Side Community Committee Records, Box 30, Folder 410, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[142] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job,” Chicago Daily News, 23 December 1942, p. 1; 4, Folder 543, HHC.

[143] Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning.”

[144] Howard Vincent O’Brien, “All Things Considered,” Chicago Daily News, n.d., but copyright at bottom of article says 1943, Folder 543, HHC.

[145] Trolander contends that the settlement houses in Chicago and New York were able to retain their political independence from the pressures of conservative boards for a longer time than other cities: “The important difference is that both New York and Chicago settlements housed leaders with radical political philosophies. In addition there was no Chest or welfare federation to regulate the activities of these settlements, thus radicals were free to organize. As a rule, the boards of the major settlements in these two cities did not interfere with settlement activities.” Trolander, Settlement Houses, 106.

[146] Trustees’ Minutes, Jan 8, 1937, Box 1, Folder 5, HHC.

[147] Bowen to Elizabeth H. Webster, May 3, 1937, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum; Webster to Bowen, May 4, 1937, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2; Trustees’ Minutes, January 27, 1939; March 24, 1939; December 20, 1940;

[148] See: Peggy Glowacki’s Helen Culver biographical entry in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) USE SHORT FORM FOR BOOK; Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, March 26, 1895, ser. 1 Swarthmore College Peace Collection, JAC.

[149] Trustees’ Minutes, January 20, 1942.

[150] This data has been gathered primarily from the Minutes of the Hull-House Association, the Hull-House Year Books and Bulletins: April 25, 1895, March 14, 1903; April 14, 1903; October 15, 1907; January 27, 1908; April 14, 1908: October 30, 1928; November 1, 1928; April 9, 1929; June 18, 1929; October 29, 1929; April 29, 1930;May 27, 1935, Board of Trustees’ Minutes, Hull-House Collection, Dept. of Spec. Collections, Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC);Hull-House Bulletin 3, no. 12 (November and December 1899): 4. Biographical information on Sewell Avery: Marquis,Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; for Helen Bowen Blair: Marquis, Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; “Helen Culver Funeral To Be Held Saturday,” Chicago Tribune, 20 August 1925, p. 10; “Helen Culver Leaves U. of C. $600,000,” Chicago Tribune, 14 November 1925, p. 1; “C.L. Hutchinson, Banker, Is Dead. Long Active in Civics, Art, and Charities.” Chicago Tribune, 8 October 1924, p. 1. See biographies of Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, Louise deKoven Bowen and Helen Culver in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionaryedited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). USE SHORT FORM FOR BOOK

[151] Thomas H. Beacom Jr., lawyer & trust officer, First National Bank; Edward McCormick Blair [Louise Bowen’s grandson], investment banker; Homer Buckley, advertising & direct marketing; Lawrence D. Smith, mining company official; Purcell L. Smith, public utilities; John E. Blunt, III, investment banker; Wallace Flower, executive with William Blair, brokerage house on the N.Y. Stock Exchange and in-laws of the Bowens; William H. Regnery, textile manufacturer were the trustees Louise Bowen brought to the board in the late 1930s and 1940s.

[152] See: Paul Milkman, PM: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940–1948 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 1997), for a discussion of this experiment in Left-leaning journalism that was financed mostly by Field. ; in 1944 Levin was on the personnel practices committee of the HH Board of Trustees. Minutes, March 24, 1944, Folder 7, Series 1, Hull-House Collection.

[153] “Deny Miss Carr’s Politics Caused Hull House Rift. Trustees Say Budget Row Led to Resignation,” Chicago Tribune, 4 January 1943, p. 11; Trustees’ Minutes, December 1, 1942; Trustees’ Minutes, December 21, 1942, Hull House Collection.

[154] Trustees’ Minutes, December 1, 1942; Trustees’ Minutes, December 21, 1942, Hull House Collection. According to a newspaper account, “the trustees met in special executive session Monday and voted to accept Miss Carr’s resignation. Only nine of the board’s 22 members were present.” Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job,” Chicago Daily News, 23 December 1942, p. 1; 4, Folder 543, Hull House Collection.

[155] Alex Elson Oral Interview transcript, OH-074 [interviewed by Stuart J. Hecht] October 12, 1980, 13, Hull House Collection. Elson described how “an issue arose as to whether or not Japanese children from the internment camps should be permitted to come to Bowen Country Club and to Hull House activities and I took a very strong position that they should. This was after Pearl Harbor, and general anti-Japanese feeling . . . Mrs. Bowen, chair of the Board, was a super patriot, and blind in her patriotism and was opposed to this, but I spoke up at the Board Meeting and got some support from Marshall Field, who was then the editor of the Sun-Times, the old Sun. It didn’t do much good. I lost the battle.”

[156] Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, traces the involvement of progressives like Grace Abbott in the establishment of social security under FDR. For our purposes here I indicate the overlap of the first group of reformers in the New Deal and do not take up Gordon’s more important critique of the role of maternalism in the outcome of a two-tier welfare system in the U.S.

[157] It would be interesting to find out how settlement houses worked with the new community organizations that emerged in the post-World War II decades, from 1947 to 1963.

[158] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job,” Chicago Daily News, 23 December 1942, p. 1; 4, Folder 543, Hull House Collection; “Jane Addams Spirit in Carr Background,” American, 26 December 1942, Folder 543, Hull House Collection; Louise Bowen to Alma Petersen, March 30, 1949. Russell Ballard Papers, Supplement II, Folder 36. Special Collections.

[159] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job.” NEED REST OF THE CITE.

[160] Louise Bowen to Alma Petersen, March 30, 1949. WHERE?

[161] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job.”

[162] “Jane Addams Spirit in Carr Background,” American, December 26, 1942, Folder 543, Hull House Collection, Spec. Coll., UIC. The Union for Democratic Action ironically was established by people on the left who were attempting to create an independent left that was separate from the American Communist Party and organizations perceived as CP fronts. The conservative press never bought this distinction.

[163] “Charlotte Carr, Relief Aide, Dies,” New York Times, 13 July 1956, p. 19.

December 5, 2008July 29, 2026

Revisiting The Social Settlement as Woman’s Space: The Men At Hull-House, 1889-1935.

This post was presented by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Newberry Library Seminar on Women and Gender, December 5, 2008.

In the 1980s and 1990s, historians Kathryn Kish Sklar, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, and Robyn Muncy identified a new women’s culture at Hull-House.[1] Their work focused on the early years, analyzing the networks and alliances (across classes and across different sectors of the reform movement). Active support by clubwomen (for example through volunteer work and financial contributions) allowed Hull-House settlement women to have an autonomous, nurturing, synergistic space from which to help build national and international reform networks. Seeing Hull-House as a community of women continues to influence our ideas about social reform in the Progressive Era. Hull-House continues to dominate the reform literature even as historians have attempted to recover the history of the multifarious social settlement movement. [2]

Building on the earlier work of scholars who have focused on the role of women at Hull-House, Mary Jo Deegan, Charlene Haddock Seigfried and Dorothy Ross have focused on the way Hull-House functioned as a place where women were able to carve out an intellectual domain different from the emerging male academic model.[3] Addams argued that she could learn about what the neighbors’ reality consisted of through lived experience and she claimed her work was scientific: she and other residents offered their studies “not as exhaustive treatises, but as recorded observations which may possibly be of value, because they are immediate, and the result of long acquaintance.” Addams made it clear that the authority for her political activism comes from having lived in the neighborhood not as a theoretician or scholar but as an activist engaged in constructive work. This manner of knowing the neighborhood is valorized by Addams and is the hallmark of the sociological investigation undertaken by settlement houses independently of universities or government agencies. Thus Addams created a new role for herself (and for other activist women) without being a professor at a university, a government official, an elected politician, or a captain of industry. [4] Jane Addams, in particular, has been recast as a public intellectual, a sociologist, and her writings seen as influential in the development of modern social policy on the industrial state and democracy: her educational ideas and innovative assessments of democracy and social ethics linked to the American pragmatist, John Dewey. [5]

This paper does not aim to dislodge the valuable scholarship mentioned above. Rather, it proposes to provoke some questions about how our interpretation of Hull-House might need to be revised if we factor into our analysis new scholarship that brings men from the periphery of settlement life into the center as influential residents, favored advisors, trustees and financial contributors, and important political allies. Acknowledging that the notion of Hull-House as women’s space was a powerful concept for the emerging field of U.S. women’s history, to what extent did the concept gain its power from the need of the field? To what extent is it still a valid analytic tool? How might it be modified in the light of new research, both research that has been done and research that remains to be done?

Most readers are familiar with the early stories of the two women—Addams and Starr—who set up housekeeping in the old, dilapidated Hull homestead located in a Chicago neighborhood teeming with immigrants. “As the years went on,” Alice Hamilton, who had lived at the settlement for twenty-two years, recalled, “Hull-House grew till it covered more than a city block and its activities increased in variety as the little group of residents came to include many people of many interests. We had Gerard Swope and his wife, Frederick Deknatel, whose son [William] now continues his father’s devoted service, George M. R. Twose, Edward and Charles Yeomans, George Hooker, William l. Chenery, Edith and Grace Abbott, Sophonisba Breckinridge, the Robert Morss Lovetts, Harriet Monroe, and many others.”[6] Hamilton named an interesting group. Most of them are individuals not associated with Hull-House. There are quite a few men; and there are married couples. The following is a shorthand identification of Hamilton’s group: Gerard Swope, later the president of General Electric, met his wife, Mary Hill, a student of John Dewey, when the two were residents. Co-officiating at the marriage in 1901, Jane Addams proclaimed the two exhibited exceptional social citizenship—the highest form of civic engagement in democracy. “Because all of us here have known Gerard and Mary so intimately, because they have each shown so genuine a sense of social obligation, and because each has for years striven to fulfill something of the social claim, we may perhaps venture to emphasize the social aspects of this marriage.”[7] Frederick Deknatel was a local manufacturer who became a Hull-House resident after the death of his first wife; he met Wilfreda Brockway, who taught in the kindergarten, and they married. The Deknatels remained residents living in one of the apartments set up for married couples. Twose, an Englishman who taught manual training in the public schools and woodworking at the Hull House shops, was the first president of the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts founded in 1897; he lived at Hull-House until his death. The Yeoman brothers owned a pump factory in Chicago and both married women they met at Hull-House. William Chenery was a journalist who after his Hull-House years became the editor of Collier’s Weekly in New York . The Abbotts and Sophonisba Breckinridge are well-known for their work and need little introduction here.[8] Ida Lovett had heard Jane Addams while she was a student at Radcliffe; she and Robert, who was appointed in 1893 instructor in English at the University of Chicago, had visited Hull-House in their earlier years in Chicago and after WWI became active residents; Ida helped Addams administrate and was, according to her husband, “one of Miss Addams’ close companions, sharing her company on journeys and giving her always the watchful care which became more necessary as the years passed.”[9] Lovett had a long career as a professor of literature at the University of Chicago, was an associate editor of The New Republic, and a radical liberal who defended First Amendment rights during the 1920s. Poet and editor Harriet Monroe was one of many talented people who found kindred spirits in the Hull-House complex.

One of the major findings of my study of residency at Hull-House is that there were a lot more men at the settlement, even in the early years, than historians have indicated. Between 1889 and 1935, 33 per cent of the Hull-House residents were men.[10] An article in the 1934 Hull-House Yearbook discussed the fortieth anniversary celebration that was held May 1930 (instead of September 1929) and summed up residency: “It was interesting that of the 350 surviving residents—naming only those men and women who had been in residence for at least six months continuously and had given substantial service to Hull-House—divided into occupations as follows: Business, 58; education, 52; authors and journalists, 25; artists and musicians, 34; law, 18; medicine, 21; government service, 17; social and civic work, 76; agriculturists, 7; home-makers, 42.” [11] Male residents dominated the categories of business and law and were quite visible in government service and social and civic work, absent only from the category “home-makers.” My study of residents at Hull-House between 1889 and 1961 finds that 41 percent were men.[12]

What about other settlement houses in the United States? (Of course, we know that Toynbee Hall in London only had male residents and was the model for settlements worldwide.) In 1911, the first year that statistics on male and female participation in settlements in the United States was available, “53 percent of the 214 settlements reporting to investigators housed women only; less than 2 percent only men. The rest accommodated both sexes.”[13] That meant 45 percent of American settlements housed women and men. There are no statistics on what percentages of men were resident in the 45 percent of sexually integrated settlements. So it is speculation to conclude that Hull-House was unusually rich in male residency, although this “community of women” in fact was significantly populated by men.

There is no evidence that Jane Addams and Ellen Starr ever conceived of their settlement experiment as an effort to develop a new kind of sex-segregated space for women to inhabit. During the several months prior to renting space in the old Hull homestead, Starr and Addams were busy introducing their “scheme” to circles of reform-minded Chicagoans, clubwomen, clergy, and college-educated women and men who might be candidates to join the two founders as residents. Starr gleefully reported to Addams that lots of young men had attended a reception held to talk about the plan. This was comforting because both Starr and Addams did not want to be perceived as some sort of “Protestant nuns.” Edward L. Burchard, Hull-House’s first male resident, came to Hull-House in 1891. He had heard Addams talk about Toynbee Hall in 1888 or 1889. “I wonder if you remember the time as a young lady you spoke on Toynbee Hall in the parlors of the First Presbyterian Church at Freeport. This was before you projected Hull-House. Your description of the hungry crowd around the huckster wagon in east London, I shall never forget.”[14] Burchard, who eventually served for many years as secretary of the Chicago Recreation Commission, was part of the small circle of women and men at Hull-House who first conceived and then implemented the “belief that through the exhibit method” immigrant citizenship could be promoted.[15] Burchard later worked at the Field Museum of Natural History, developed innovative educational tours for the Chicago public schools, and with Milton Foreman, Harriet E. Vittum, Lea Taylor, Neva Boyd and others promoted a vast array of cultural, recreational, and civic programs for the Chicago [parks] field house system.[16]

Burchard credited Addams with his interest in public service. Hull-House brought idealistic men as well as women into the widening circles of progressivism and modeled for men an alternative professional route of public service. Other male residents’ careers attest to the existence of a male dominion of public service that was incubated in social settlements and had far-reaching results. While Robyn Muncy and others are correct in emphasizing that college-educated women were very limited in opportunities to pursue careers instead of traditional womanly work, men who were not interested in the commercial or industrial world and who, like idealistic young women, hoped to work for the betterment of society, faced a variety of problems. If they were inclined to do their work in a religious context, as Graham Taylor, founder of Chicago Commons settlement and professor of applied sociology at the Congregational seminary, chose to do, they still needed a community of kindred spirits who would support new methods of dealing with modern problems. They needed new kinds of educational institutions, which was why Taylor joined with other Chicago settlement leaders to establish the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. [17] In the case of Burchard, who taught at the School of Civics and Philanthropy, his niche was in the new field of adult and public school education outside the traditional classroom in newly created public spaces in urban America. The proliferation of parks and recreation centers, for example, created opportunities for persons who would manage these facilities. New theories about the importance of play in child development, ideas about constructive leisure for adults, and reformist agendas to provide wholesome entertainment as a substitute for saloons, dance halls, and pool rooms in immigrant and working class neighborhoods came out of the experiences of men and women residents of settlement houses. It is not surprising that by 1912, the high point of progressivism, an infrastructure of theoreticians and researchers, practitioners, and public officials was in place that was implementing the settlement workers’ commitment to a series of closely related reform movements. Men who had been residents at Hull-House found themselves in key positions in this new world of playgrounds, summer camps, programs for the prevention of juvenile delinquency, and programs in public schools like manual training. Former resident Alexander A. McCormick had been elected president of the Cook County Board in 1912. Addams had campaigned for his election. “One of his first undertakings,” Addams recalled, “was to reorganize the Civil Service Board and to appoint as a member of it an able woman, long identified with the Chicago settlements.”[18] The appointee, Anna Nichols “did much to dissociate civil service from the conception of a cold and correct public official versus the kind-hearted and open-handed politician” approved Jane Addams. The settlement crowd had learned that the good government type reformers who did not have the benefit of residency in immigrant and working class neighborhoods “overemphasized the usefulness in keeping the rascals out and had thus allowed [the merit system] to become stranded in the shallow water of negative virtue, failing to launch it upon the deep seas of popular affection.”[19] As Addams had cautioned in her analysis of local politics, “it is most difficult to hold to our political democracy and to make it in any sense a social expression and not a mere governmental contrivance, unless we take pains to keep on common ground in our human experiences.”[20] Men like A.A. McCormick, then, Addams might have argued, benefited from the settlement experience and the interaction of male and female perspectives.

Male social reformers who emerged from the social settlement movement instead of men’s good government clubs that met in downtown office buildings and had remote connections with neighborhood life, one can speculate, might not share the same agenda; perhaps the male reformers who experienced settlement life developed a viewpoint closer to the female political culture. [21] George E. Hooker, mentioned above, was one of the few advocates of city planning who criticized the Burnham Plan for its failure to deal with the urban housing problem. He wrote for the Review of Reviews and other periodicals including the Chicago Tribune, Hooker held degrees in law and the ministry. He was as comfortable with the City Club of Chicago as he was with the Hull-House Men’s Club—a neighborhood organization—and his sensibilities about urban problems gained from his long residency in Hull-House and daily exposure to the realities of working class life.

Another Hull-House male resident, Ernest Carroll Moore, who later became the president of the University of California, Los Angeles, did his investigation of the saloons of the Nineteenth Ward –Johnny Power’s fiefdom and location of the settlement house—for the Committee of Fifty while he was in residence at Hull-House. He lived at Hull-House with his wife, Dr. Dorothea Moore, a physician, while he was working toward a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His contact with skilled, ambitious workers in the neighborhood was extensive; he taught college extension courses to the English-speaking Americans of Irish and German descent who had not yet abandoned the old neighborhood and to whom the classes and educational offerings of the social settlement answered their strivings for self-improvement. Moore’s unconventional conclusions about the role of the saloon in working-class life—more empathetic and democratic in attitude than the typical temperance reformer—were not unlike Addams’s realistic assessment of why the ward boss survived. In both cases the traditional institutions were performing necessary functions in the social life of people. If reformers wanted to transform popular culture and uplift the masses, they had to find effective substitutes that met the everyday needs of people.

Numbers of males and females, of course, do not tell the whole story of the gender of institutions. Public schools are notorious as institutions with overwhelming majorities of women teachers but are dominated in the nineteenth and for more than half of the twentieth century by male administrators and male school board members. Would we call public schools a female dominion? There is no question that during the first twenty years of its existence, Hull-House was dominated by strong, independent women who emerged as leading figures in diverse fields and who influenced national events. It is also clear that the environment at Hull-House was fertile for the development of individual careers and for alliances and lifelong and sustaining friendships among women.

Much has been made of the way in which traditional domestic space at Hull-House was transformed into a new kind of cultural and social space that was liberating for women. Hull-House residents were freed from domestic chores [which other working-class women performed instead], and were able to actively engage in community affairs as single women without benefit of male sponsorship or guardianship. Women settlement workers were treated like nurses or religious sisters and allowed to roam the neighborhoods, use public transportation, and come and go as they pleased without losing status or respectability as middle-class women in Victorian America. On the other hand, there were many aspects of the Hull-House physical complex that adhered to the conventional gendered space relationships in the society as a whole. The Hull-House Women’s Club was housed in a building just for that purpose; the Hull-House Men’s Club had its own building and the interior spaces of both clubs conformed to notions of masculinity and femininity that most late nineteenth century Americans would recognize. Children’s care was done by women. While there were bohemian aspects to the complex—artists’ studios; salon-like parlors where men and women residents discussed politics, religion, and sex; and there was a constant flow of visitors whose political and social views were controversial—there was also decorum and modesty. Women residents lived in the main house; men had a cottage where they roomed; married couples were housed in apartments that were more private. Additional sex-segregated housing for working-class women and men was established at the Jane Club and at a male residence that was a short-lived experiment. The sexual orientation of the residents did not appear to be a matter for discussion, nor were other personal matters, according to Alice Hamilton. “We knew each others’ opinions and interests and work and we discussed them often and freely, but the atmosphere was impersonal, rather astonishingly so for a group composed chiefly of women.”[22] Everyone acknowledged the special relationship Jane Addams had with Mary Rozet Smith; yet the two lived separately, with Mary remaining in her family’s townhouse on Chicago’s fashionable North Side.[23]

It was in the governance of Hull-House where the nature of gender at Hull-House becomes more complicated. There is no question that the case for Hull-House as women’s space can best be made from the model of leadership provided by Jane Addams. This was an institution run by a woman—or was it? In 1935, the Hull-House settlement had existed for forty-five years as a private, not-for-profit association governed by a board of seven trustees, including Jane Addams who called herself “head resident” and did not take a salary. She was, until 1907, both the president and the treasurer of this board. The majority of the trustees had held their positions from the 1890s—when the system was put into place—until Jane Addams’s death in 1935, or, if they preceded her, their own death. The trustees, during the Addams’s years, were women and men who overall can be described as wealthy civic-minded progressives who were responding to the evils of the industrial city. Addams, one of their class,[24] had established the settlement with her own funds and they backed her “experiment” and accepted her leadership. Since Addams was a volunteer who invested her own money in the settlement, she fit a model of womanly benevolence not one of professionalism. The trustees were there to offer advice and counsel, not to supervise or to develop policy, unless asked directly. Addams, then, had a great deal of personal discretion and reigned almost completely unchallenged by the close-knit group of trustees.[25] In addition, Hull-House was not affiliated with a religious denomination or a university so had an enviable independent position. This may be one of the most significant sources of female empowerment at the settlement. At Hull-House Jane Addams did not have to report to the kind of traditional male-dominated board and administrative hierarchy that ran settlements affiliated with religious denominations or universities.

The Hull-House trustees also were among the settlement’s major contributors: multi-millionaire heiress and leading civic reformer Louise Bowen, who continued to dominate the trustees until her death in 1953; Mary Rozet Smith, Jane’s life partner; Helen Culver, the heir of the Charles Hull real estate empire, and owner of the Hull homestead[26] and the property surrounding it; Mary Wilmarth[27], a feminist clubwoman and one of Hull-House’s earliest supporters; William H. Colvin, retired businessman and chairman of the executive committee of the Municipal Voters’ League; Julius Rosenwald, who owned Sears Roebuck, Co., and was a leading philanthropist known for his support of education for African Americans in the South and his sponsorship of the NAACP; and Sewell Avery, president of the U.S. Gypsum Company and Chairman of the Board of Montgomery Ward & Company. Completing the list of trustees were the philosopher John Dewey, wealthy businessmen and art patrons Edward B. Butler and Charles L. Hutchinson, and Allen B. Pond, architect and social activist whose life had been animated by the ideals of the arts and crafts movement. When old-timers died, they were replaced by other family members or individuals well-known to those on the board. Charles Hull Ewing “replaced” his cousin, Helen Culver; Louise Bowen added her daughter Helen Bowen Blair in 1929 when the number of trustees increased from seven to nine.[28]

From the earliest days of settlement life, Addams relied on Pond, Colvin, and Mary Rozet Smith’s father, Charles Mather Smith, in an on-going “conversation” about the plans she had for Hull-House’s expansion and development. Colvin probably reminded Addams of the best men of her father’s generation. A Civil War veteran, Colvin was the son of a New York shipper. Initially the young man Colvin worked for a large and established importing house in New York City before following a pattern of many East Coast business families by moving to Chicago to take advantage of the westward expansion of commerce. He became, by 1887, the largest importer in the city. Never involved in politics, he was one of sixteen good government reformers who established the Municipal Voters’ League of which he served as chairmen of its executive committee. He was just the sort of enlightened capitalist who Addams cultivated and from which she obtained financial support. When trustee William Colvin died unexpectedly in 1896, Addams was in Russia. She received word of Colvin’s death and wrote Gertrude Barnum, a resident who was more or less in charge of daily activities at the settlement during Addams’s six-month sojourn in Europe. “Of course you know as well as I what a blow [Colvin’s death] … is to H.H. and what a genuine personal sorrow it is as well” Addams acknowledged. Indicating how much the settlement relied on Colvin (who was “developing in all sorts of directions mostly in the direction of money getter for general expenses”[29]) she imagined Barnum feeling “perfectly bereft . . . as if the prop had fallen out.” [30] On her part Addams, who had just visited Tolstoy in his country estate and was scheduled to remain away from Hull-House for another six to eight weeks, lost interest in the rest of her trip and wanted “to be at home.”[31]

While it is true that the major funding of Hull-House came from a handful of women who developed extraordinarily close relationships with Addams, the male trustees, who also contributed considerable amounts, made significant contributions,[32] especially Julius Rosenwald, Joseph T. Bowen, and Charles Mather Smith, the last two mentioned the husband and father respectively of Louise deKoven Bowen and Mary Rozet Smith.[33] More than any quantifiable amount, the visibility of such well-known Chicago industrialists and capitalists like Charles Hutchinson and Sewell Avery legitimated the institution in the eyes of society. These men demonstrated to wealthy women like Helen Culver and Louise Bowen –who were the major contributors in absolute figures—that they were investing in an institution that was a going concern. Bowen and Culver were fiscally conservative women. Their support for Hull-House was not automatic but had to be earned. Bowen had been impressed by Addams’s judicious assessment of George Pullman during the 1894 Pullman Strike.[34] The daughter and granddaughter of wealthy capitalists on both her maternal and paternal sides, Bowen had faith in Addams because she sensed that at heart the reformer was not a revolutionary and could see both sides of the labor and capital conflict. Bowen would have been the last person to invest in an enterprise that was attempting to construct a space for women that was in opposition to family values or was some utopian scheme with no demonstrable practical value.[35] She felt comfortable with the male trustees because they were very successful capitalists and industrialists like her kinsmen and her husband. In a sense, the same could be said for Mary Rozet Smith. Addams understood that it was important to cultivate the entire Smith family and that Charles Mather Smith, had to be assured of the rationality and stability of the Hull-House enterprise.[36]

The case of architect Allen Pond also demonstrates how the presence of men performed a salutary role for the female trustees. Addams met Pond before she had selected the dilapidated Charles Hull homestead as the site for a settlement house. He was one of the many reform-minded Chicagoans to whom Addams and Ellen Gates Starr introduced their scheme to open a settlement house and, from the beginning, Pond embraced the idea. Pond was the architect for the twelve additional buildings that were constructed from 1889 to 1907 as the settlement complex took shape and he served as secretary of the settlement’s board of trustees for thirty-four years, until his death in 1929. Pond had other commitments in Chicago—he was the architect for most of the city’s settlement houses—but he served as the “go-between” in Addams’s initially difficult relationship with Helen Culver. Culver, who had inherited the substantial real estate business of her cousin, Charles Hull, in 1889, was a shrewd woman who had been the actual manager of the real estate firm for many years. Culver owned the Hull homestead and all of the property that later became the settlement complex. As a landlady she was tough; eventually she warmed to the work that Addams and Starr had inaugurated, donating the land and in 1920 an additional quarter of a million dollars worth of securities. It was Culver who pushed a reluctant Addams into “institutionalizing” the “experiment” by demanding it be incorporated under Illinois law (if Addams wanted her support). And part of the agreement was that Culver, or a relative of Culver, would always have a seat as a trustee of the Hull-House Association. Without Allen Pond’s skillful, persistent, and sensitive handling of Culver, it is conceivable that the enterprise would not have flourished in the manner which it did.

So the realities of institution-building brought Addams into close association with men and women who were rich and influential people. Instead of clipping her wings, they managed to protect Addams. The meteoric rise to international prominence that Addams and the settlement achieved also gave her a protected status.[37] After her death, there were no head residents (now called directors) of equal stature or, obviously, whose relationship to the trustees had an equivalency.[38] Her relationship with male and female trustees and contributors was very empowering for Addams and gave her the ability to speak out on many controversial stands without fear of reprisal, and to defend the rights of political dissidents worldwide. It allowed her to personally ally herself with unpopular causes and individuals, to establish radical organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and to maintain a large degree of freedom for the individual residents who came to live in the Hull-House complex.[39]

There was yet another influence which men at Hull-House brought to the female-run settlement. One of the largest occupational categories of the 350 residents who were still living in 1930, at the time that the survey was made, was that of business. It could be argued that Addams and the settlement influenced young men who were headed for careers in business in a positive direction. At the same time, knowledge and understanding of such individuals, especially as they evolved in their careers, gave Addams an unusual perspective regarding what historians have identified as welfare capitalism. The fact that both businessmen and labor leaders felt they could have a role in Hull-House was in part a recognition of Addams’s approach to cross-class interactions and her commitment to bringing all sides together. Between 1894 and 1930 Addams had reacted to crises in industrial capitalism and to men like George Pullman by advocating negotiation: she called for strong labor organizations and for enlightened stewardship on the part of owners. She disliked conflict and preferred arbitration and reconciliation. She was a relatively inexperienced young woman when in 1894 as the representative of the Civic Federation of Chicago she unsuccessfully attempted to bring George Pullman and labor leaders at his company who hoped to gain recognition of their union together to settle the Pullman conflict.[40] Her first significant article on the role of the settlement and the labor conflict, included in Hull-House Maps & Papers (1895)[41] prefigured her later support of the role of the State as arbitrator in industrial conflict. Refusing to accept the inevitability of class conflict, Addams differed from Florence Kelley and Ellen Gates Starr. Her analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Pullman and his planned town, for example, were based on her belief in the democratic process where workers’ rights to negotiate the conditions of the workplace and wages and hours were accepted by owners. Indeed, Pullman, by taking away the rights of his workers to determine how they would live outside of work, had stripped them of their citizenship. While she understood the reason why workers went on strike and even admired the solidarity of sympathy strikes, her goal of industrial harmony was paramount and often created misunderstandings about her positions from capitalists and workers. She was profoundly dedicated to democratic solutions to conflict and for Addams this meant the acceptance of the concept of interdependency and mutuality in all social relationships. [42]

It is not surprising, then, that Hull-House welcomed industrial managers and businessmen as residents as well as labor leaders and radicals who advocated different political and economic solutions to the industrial conflict of the era. Addams’s major agenda, one that she articulated innumerable times in her writing, was to create a new kind of space where the expression of a democratic social intercourse was possible. “Up to the time that I met [Hull-House resident Gerard] Swope, I had associated only with workers and trade-unionists,” Russian Jewish immigrant Philip Davis explained. “Their doctrine that all bosses were evil men and, by inference, that all trade-unionists were righteous, appeared absurd when I saw what sort of individual Swope was.” Swope taught English and arithmetic at Hull-House and Davis, who was trying to improve himself, eagerly allowed his new mentor to correct his speech. “Oftentimes we went to his laboratory at Western Electric, where he showed me how to conduct experiments in physics and chemistry” Davis recollected.[43] All this prepared the young immigrant for college entrance examinations. As did Addams, Swope encouraged Davis to take an interest in labor, the field to which he returned after completing his education. Swope was an example “of the future industrialist, at ease with labor men like [Abraham] Bisno, [Sidney] Hillman and others of his day, as well as with the prominent figures representing management” Davis concluded.[44] Both Bisno and Hillman were labor leaders with deep connections to Hull-House.

At the same time Addams was on good terms with the heads of many manufacturing concerns. Enos S. Burton, who encouraged his “most promising young men” from Western Electric to live at Hull-House, had most likely sent Gerard Swope to Hull-House, currently at Western Electric and the future head of General Electric; he also pushed Walter S. Gifford, the future head of American Telephone & Telegraph in the direction of the settlement, where he, too, was a resident. “Let them see all they can of all kinds of people and of their requirements,” Burton told Addams. “It would be the best possible preparation in this business of electricity which is pushing out so rapidly into so many new fields in response to the incredible variety of human needs.”[45]

Swope had been a resident of Hull-House in the late 1890s. The son of German Jews from St. Louis, Missouri, Swope’s family had prospered (his father was a clock manufacturer in St. Louis) and Gerard graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1895. When Swope was President of Mercantile Electric Company for a short period of time in St. Louis, he and his wife, Mary Dayton Hill also a resident, did not give up their interest in understanding the working class, and they rented two houses next to one another in a slum neighborhood very much like the one in which Hull-House was situated. There Mary Swope set up textile looms just like the ones she had used in her work with Italian women at Hull-House, and began doing crafts with the immigrant women and men who were her new neighbors. Their stay in St. Louis was short, however, but the pattern of activity for the couple, as prophesized in Jane Addams’s wedding statement in 1901, had been established: the couple integrated raising children and homelife with Swope’s commitment to enlightened industrial management, and Mary and Gerard’s support of a democratic social ethics through social settlements, and engagement in civic affairs both nationally and internationally.

Back in Chicago, Swope was given the responsibility of reorganizing Western Electric’s Hawthorne factory. He “brace[d] Western Electric for the panic of 1907” giving him a chance to “test his theories about what to do in a period of diminishing business.”[46] When a strike threatened, Swope consulted with his Hull-House colleagues and took their advice to negotiate honestly with his workers. [47]According to business historian Ellis W. Hawley, between 1913 and 1922 Swope accomplished three tasks that “enhanced his reputation as an organizational genius”: a systematic reorganization of Western Electric’s foreign interests; as a dollar-a year man during World War I, the overhaul of the Army Supply Service; and third, a rebuilding of General Electric’s operations abroad. “As the first president of International General Electric, a GE subsidiary, Swope became the prime mover behind an intricate series of corporate reorganizations and multinational business agreements, and in association with such foreign statesmen as Walther Rathenau of Germany and Louis Loucheur of France he took a keen interest in European reconstruction.”[48]

Internally, Swope remained true to the standards for industrial relations that he had gleaned from his relationships with Hull-House reformers. He employed Dr. Alice Hamilton, whose expertise in industrial toxicology was well-known to him since his Hull-House days, to oversee the industrial environment of the GE factories to ensure the health of the workers, and by 1923 he was experimenting with stock options for his employees. [49] Meanwhile both Mary and Gerard were on the boards of Greenwich House and the Henry Street settlements in New York and Mary continued her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Meanwhile Addams had become increasingly an advocate for the “American effort to combine industrial and commercial activities that shall operate by consent” as an alternative to “the strong-arm control by employers” of industry, or the “constant struggle between organized capital and organized labor with the result in some trades of trade-union tyranny, and in others of employers’ tyranny, in either case accompanied by conflict and instability.”[50] She favored a mixed economy: municipalization of electric systems; Federal projects like Boulder Dam; and privately run economic activities “if the latter can be controlled when specifically dangerous or anti-social.” [51] She had been impressed with men like Gerard Swope and Julius Rosenwald, the latter attempting similar experiments with stock ownership for his employees at Sears, Roebuck& Company in Chicago. Even with the financial crisis of 1929, Addams could write in 1930 that “a mixed type of state with competitive and cooperative elements may have the greatest survival value and prove to be the most serviceable.”[52] She could even look with hopeful anticipation of the globalization of American business. In the General Electric plants she had visited in China and Japan she had witnessed the improvement of the workers of these countries “so long regarded as mere labor power, lifted into regions where a standard of living became a matter of world-wide concern.”[53] She was happy to acknowledge the Hull-House link with Gerard Swope, who “was preparing to announce an unemployment plan designed to make funds available for such of the company’s 75,000 employees as may be forced into idleness in time of business depression.”[54] Swope had acknowledged the influence of Hull-House and Addams in a letter in which he detailed the new plan.[55] “In September 1931, with the economy mired in depression, Swope’s vision of an organized capitalism became the basis for the much publicized Swope Plan. All major firms, he proposed, should be organized into mandatory trade associations, and under federal supervision these should regulate economic activity and provide social insurance programs.” [56]

Initially met with strong criticism from the business community, Swope’s approach was adopted in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, and Swope served on such implementing agencies as the Industrial Advisory Board, the National Labor Board, and the Business and Advisory and Planning Council. Swope supported the New Deal after 1934, unlike the majority of businessmen, although he continued to maintain that industrial self-government should be an important part of any American plan. He also advocated the creation of a federal social insurance system and from the start advocated that both employers and employees contribute to such a program.[57] When in 1935 the National Chamber of Commerce voted to deny support for FDR’s programs, including unemployment insurance and other aspects of the proposed social security legislation, Swope and a handful of the major industrialists formed a subcommittee that voiced a minority opinion and offered their support to President Roosevelt. Swope became one of thirty business and professional leaders who served as voluntary economic advisers to the administration. Swope’s advocacy of the social security system came out of his belief in the cooperation of private and public sectors to create a humane society. When the Supreme Court declared the National Recovery Act unconstitutional in 1935, Swope went public: “Maximum hours and minimum wages, and the abolition of child labor have come to stay, despite the verdict on the NRA.”[58]

Addams would have been gratified with the news of Swope’s advocacy of the Social Security Act whose passage she did not live to see. It was, perhaps, the highest example of the kind of enlightened industrial relations she had envisioned when she began her advocacy of a social citizenship for both capital and labor. How much she would have credited Swope’s Hull-House experiences in shaping his social policies we can only conjecture.

Addams’s The Second Twenty Years was published in November, 1930, before the financial crash had become a deep and catastrophic economic depression. During the final five years of her life, Addams endured health crises and weakened physical well-being; she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, which helped to repair the long rejection by many Americans of her international policies that had begun in 1915. She withstood the death of her life partner, Mary Rozet Smith in 1934. And until her death, she remained engaged in peace movement activities and advocated for New Deal programs. Hull-House had significant connections to the New Deal because many of the New Dealers were former Hull-House residents or allies of the reform network in which the settlement was a leading force.[59] Historians have linked the powerful women of Hull-House with the New Deal and the construction of the welfare state but have overlooked the powerful men of Hull-House who were also significant players in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administrations. Gerard Swope’s advocacy of New Deal reforms is an example of the male dominion that emanated from Hull-House and stretched to the national level of leadership at a crucial time in America’s struggle with industrialization.

This paper is a beginning effort to use the gender lens in a more complicated interpretation of the construction of social roles for men and women. As the editor of a decade-long research project that culminated in a reference book on Chicago women, I share with the historians of the 1980s and 1990s the goal of uncovering the role of women in society in all of the depth and complexity that such work requires. It was critically important to bring women out of the shadows and when historians did so, they were shocked by the amount of work that women had accomplished before the vote was achieved and during a long period in which cultural constructions of femininity and womanhood, along with legal disabilities, made it difficult for women to change institutions and empower themselves. Determining how women were able to achieve political and policy influence, then, was a question of enormous importance. Without this foundational work it would not be possible to ask the questions this paper raised. This paper has focused entirely on Hull-House, but it argues that the more complicated gender story that it is attempting to tell has value for the interpretation of progressivism and post-progressive reform of capitalism that has suddenly become even more timely. The progressives remain a difficult group to interpret. The identity and meaning of progressivism continues to challenge historians. The revised gender model of Hull-House as a space for a new kind of interaction between men and women may help to get at the dynamics of social policy formation and political activism that formed the modern American welfare state.

[1] Helen L. Horowitz, Hull House as Women’s Space.” Chicago History, Vol. 12 (1983):40-55; Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10 (Summer 1985): 658-77; Robyn Muncy, Creating A Female Dominion in American Reform 1890-1935 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[2] Minna Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885-1930. University of Chicago Press, 1990; Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945. The University of North Carolina Press, 1993; Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889-1930 (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Ironically, the first modern book on the settlement movement in the United States, Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement 1890-1914. Oxford University Press, 1967, remains an amazingly comprehensive study. Davis was quite aware of the women in the movement and how the settlements offered an important alternative for the growing numbers of college-educated women who had a sense of uselessness; but he also noted that male college students also wanted to put theory into action. (Davis, Spearheads for Reform, 37.)

[3] Charlene Haddock Seigfried,. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); Mary Jo. Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918 (New York: Transaction Books, 1988); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science. Cambridge University Press, 1991; Dorothy Ross, “Gendered Social Knowledge: Domestic Discourse, Jane Addams, and the Possibilities of Social Science,” in Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years edited by Helene Silverberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

[4] Rima Lunin Schultz, “Introduction,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions by the residents of Hull-House (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007; originally published 1895.)

[5] Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (London & Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 20-22; Fink discusses “a distinctive women’s intellectual culture,” 23, following Dorothy Ross’s lead. See also Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), especially his chapter on Chicago.

[6] Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades; The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D. (Beverly, Mass.: OEM Press, 1995; originally published 1943),108.

[7] Jane Addams [Address at the Wedding of Mary Hill and Gerard Swope. August 1901], in JAMC (Reel 46-1069), Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

[8] Lela B. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott. University of Illinois Press, 1983; Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform. Oxford University Press, 1990; Robyn Muncy, Creating A Female Dominion in American Reform 1890-1935 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

[9] Robert M. Lovett, excerpt from his autobiography All Our Years, printed in Mary Lynn Bryan & Allen Davis, One Hundred Years At Hull-House, pp. 166-167;

[10] Information taken from a list that was prepared in 1929 of all Hull-House Residents who had lived in the House for at least six consecutive months and had entered into its activities. The names were organized into groups that divided the former (and current) residents according to professional/occupational categories and gave their current business and home addresses. There was a note indicating that the Hull-House Association files were incomplete regarding former residents. See: Hull-House Residents 1889-1929, Hull-House Association Records, folder 294, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, UIC.

[11] HH Yearbook , 1934, 69.

[12] My sources began with the list cited above and these additional materials: Alice Miller, “Hull House,” The Charities (February 1892): 167-173, clipping in Hull House Scrapbook I, HHA Records, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library (RJDL), UIC; “Noble Work at Hull House,” Chronicle, June 9, 1895; Jane Addams to [Enos M.] Barton, 1896 Nov 6, Rockford College Archives, in JAMC (Reel 3-0492-0495), Spec. Coll. RJD Lib., UIC; Florence Kelley, “Hull-House,” New England Magazine 18, no. 5 (July 1898): 550-66; HH Bulletin, 1903-04, vol. 6, no. 1; HH Bulletin, 1906-07, 5-6; 1910, 2; Edward L. Burchard to Jane Addams, December 10, 1910, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1, in JAMC (reel 5-1393-1395), Spec. Coll. RJD Lib., UIC; Hull-House Yearbook, 1921, 4; Adena Miller Rich, “Report to Hull-House Trustees,” November 27, 1935, Adena Miller Rich Papers, Folder 17, Spec. Coll., RJD Lib., UIC; List of Residents, Autumn, 1935, Adena Miller Rich Papers, folder 40, Spec. Coll.; “New Residents—Fall 1936,” (October 5, 1936, pp. 1-3) Adena Miller Rich Papers, folder 40; “Occupations of the Residents of Hull-House,” (1935-36, pp. 1-2), Adena Miller Rich Papers, folder 40; Hull-House Magazine, vol.I, no.1 (November 1939); Donna Hodgman, “People Live At Hull-House,” 1943, typescript, Jane Addams Memorial Collection , Spec. Coll., UIC; Russell W. Ballard to the Board of Trustees, HHA, January 27, 1947, Welfare Council Papers, Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum; Mary Lynn Bryan, editor. “Residents and Workers at H.H.” The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide (1996).

[13] Robyn Muncy, Creating A Female Dominion in American Reform 1890-1935 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9-10. In 1911 there were 400 settlements in the U.S. so these statistics only reflect half of the houses. So we have to settle for a very incomplete overview of male participation in settlement houses that were sexually integrated.

[14] Edward L. Burchard to Jane Addams, Dec. 21, 1931, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1 in JAMC (reel 23-139), Spec. Coll. Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[15] Edward L. Burchard to Jane Addams, Dec. 10, 1910, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1, in JAMC (reel 5-1393-1395).

[16] Edward L. Burchard to Jane Addams, March 14, 1935, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1, in JAMC (reel 26-1188).

[17] There is a complicated gender story involved with the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and its transformation into the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Here I am indicating only that Graham Taylor who definitely had the male advantage of career opportunities in the traditional ministry, and in other fields such as academe or medicine, felt an urgent need to create something new for men and women. See: Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, 66-92.

[18] Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years At Hull-House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 16-17.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964 ), 221-222. First published in 1902.

[21] Maureen Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City 1871-1933. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002) argues that women and men’s experiences were sufficiently different and that the women’s political culture which emerged in part out of settlement houses and women’s clubs led to a different vision of the city from that of male reformers. This book expands an earlier article where Flanagan compares the Women’s City Club and the [Men’s] City Club in Chicago.

[22] Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades, 61.

[23] Rima Lunin Schultz, “Smith, Mary Rozet,” in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

[24] Addams, the daughter of an Illinois State Senator and businessman who died in 1881, inherited a portion of his estate and was able to restore the old Hull home’s interior and contribute to the settlement budget, albeit with contributions from others, until about 1895. Addams was clearly a privileged woman who did not need to work; she was not, however, rich, as attested to the small amount of property and outright cash she had at the time of her death.

[25] The one exception to this is the relationship she had with Helen Culver; the incorporation of Hull-House in 1895 was a condition imposed by Culver before she would make a permanent relationship with Addams who, from 1889, had leased the house and had negotiated for each new lot for the expansion of the complex. Allen B. Pond to Helen Culver, April 18, 1906. JAMC Reel 4-1331, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC. See also: Jane Addams Memorial Collection correspondence, 1889, reel 2. Letters to landlord Helen Culver from Jane Addams in March 1890. Through the early years Addams struggled to get Culver to donate rent and eventually more buildings, finally convincing her after several years to offer some of the lots on the block for sale. See especially the letter from Jane Addams to “Dearest” (Mary Rozet Smith) March 23, 1898, JAMC reel 2.

[26] The Hull homestead was the building where Jane Addams and Ellen G. Starr opened the settlement house in 1889. For a good biography of Helen Culver see: Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, editors, Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary 1790-1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 20010.

[27] See the biographical entry of Wilmarth in Women Building Chicago. Wilmarth, among other distinctions, was the mother-in-law of Harold Ickes, a young Chicago lawyer who later went to Washington D.C.

[28] This data has been gathered primarily from the Minutes of the Hull-House Association, the Hull-House Year Books and Bulletins: April 25, 1895, March 14, 1903; April 14, 1903; October 15, 1907; January 27, 1908; April 14, 1908: October 30, 1928; November 1, 1928; April 9, 1929; June 18, 1929; October 29, 1929; April 29, 1930;May 27, 1935, Board of Trustees’ Minutes, Hull-House Collection, Dept. of Spec. Collections, Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Hull-House Bulletin 3, no. 12 (November and December 1899): 4. Biographical information on Sewell Avery: Marquis, Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; for Helen Bowen Blair: Marquis, Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; “Helen Culver Funeral To Be Held Saturday.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 20, 1925, pg. 10; “Helen Culver Leaves U. of C. $600,000.” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 14, 1925, pg. 1; “C.L. Hutchinson, Banker, Is Dead. Long Active in Civics, Art, and Charities.” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 8, 1924. pg. 1. See biographies of Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, Louise deKoven Bowen and Helen Culver in Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary 1790-1990 edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

[29] Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, June 27, 1895, in JAMC (reel 2-1637-1645), Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

[30] Jane Addams to [Barnum, Gertrude], July 25, 1896, Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, in JAMC [ ] Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[31] Ibid.

[32] The major study of who funded Hull-House was published by Kathryn Kish Sklar: “Who Funded Hull House.” Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power. Edited by Kathleen McCarthy. Rutgers University Press, 1990. This study focused on the early years of the social settlement.

[33] Quarterly meeting of the Trustees of Hull House Association, October 30, 1928; Meeting of Trustees of Hull-House Association, November 1, 1928, Hull House Collection, Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, UIC.

[34] Bowen’s version is in her autobiography Growing Up With A City (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 82. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Who Funded Hull House?” in Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women Philanthropy and Power. Edited by Kathleen D. McCarthy (New Brunswick & London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 141. Fn.39.

[35] I have written about Louise deKoven Bowen who was a prominent Episcopalian in an essay, “Woman’s Work and Woman’s Calling in the Episcopal Church: Chicago, 1880-1989,” in Episcopal Women: Gender, Spirituality, and Commitment in an American Mainline Denomination edited by Catherine M. Prelinger (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 21-22.

[36] Jane Addams to Mary Rozet Smith, February 3, 1895, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1, in JAMC (reel 2-1647-1652), Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[37] There were always critics, but Addams did not experience serious and sustained criticism until her pacifism during World War I. This was a difficult period for her personally but in an extraordinary demonstration of loyalty, Louise deKoven Bowen, a pro-war Progressive, stood by Addams and continued to fund the settlement as well as raise money from others, defending her friend and colleague at every turn. Louise deKoven Bowen, “Letter About Hull House,” in volume 2 of Speeches, Addresses, and Letters of Louise deKoven Bowen, ed. Mary Humphreys (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers, 1937): 789-92.See Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. (Chicago: Ivan Dees, 2000), pp. 251-281, for a discussion of the attacks on Addams.

[38] Adena Miller Rich is the exception that proves the pattern. As the immediate successor to Addams, this Hull-House resident who headed the Immigrants’ Protective League, an affiliated agency at the settlement that had a national reputation in the field, Rich reluctantly agreed to takeover after Addams’s death, but insisted that she be a part-time, unpaid head resident The Welfare Council of Chicago urged the trustees to find a full-time paid professional as this was becoming the trend in settlements. Charlotte Carr and Russell Ballard called themselves directors and received executive salaries. HHA Minutes of Special Meeting of Trustees, August 2, 1935; HHA Minutes, Jan 8, 1937, HHA Box 1, Folder 5;

[39] For example, no one dared suggest that Professor Robert Morss Lovett, of the University of Chicago, and his wife, Ida, leave Hull-House, where they had resided for many years, when the American Legion accused him of disloyalty. Trolander, Settlement Houses and the Great Depression, 104-105.

[40] See Victoria Brown’s article in Schneirov, Richard, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, editors. The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics. (Chicago & Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

[41] Residents of Hull-House, Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago together with comments and essays on problems growing out of social conditions.(1895). See Addams essay on the function of the settlement and labor.

[42] See: Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), especially her chapter “Industrial Amelioration.”

[43] Philip Davis, And Crown They Good (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), 89-90.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 394.

[46]

[47] David Loth, Swope of G.E. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), 58-59.

[48] Ellis W. Hawley, “Swope, Gerard,” Dictionary of American Biography, John A. Garraty, editor (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), Supplement Six, 614.

[49] “Employes [sic]to Help Manage Business of Electric Co.” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 17, 1923, pg. 16; “Financial Notes.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 5, 1923, pg. A10.

[50] Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years, 389.

[51] Ibid., 390.

[52] Ibid.. 391.

[53] Ibid., 396.

[54] Ibid., 395.

[55] Gerard Swope to Jane Addams, December 10, 1930, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Jane Addams Papers, Series 1 in JAMC (reel 21-1443-1447), Special Collections, Richard J. Daley Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[56] Hawley, “Swope, Gerard,” DAB, Supplement Six, 615.

[57] “Gerard Swope Backs Job Insurance Idea.” New York Times, July 2, 1934, pg. 42; “Opposes Insurance Bill. Gerard Swope Wants Employes [sic] to Aid in Job Compensation.” New York Times, March 22, 1935, pg. 3.

[58] “Hour-Wage Minimums To Stay, Swope Says.” New York Times, June 2, 1935, pg. 3.

[59] Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1963); Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889-1930 (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 3; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform 1890-1935 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 152-153.

July 10, 2008July 21, 2026

The Challenge of Community-Based Planning for Urban Renewal: The Case of Hull-House and the American Reform Tradition, 1930-1963,

This post was presented by Rima Lunin Schultz at a session on Community Builders: Developers, Planning, & Civic Culture in the United States in the 20th Century, at the 13th Biennial Conference of the International Planning History Society, July 10-13, 2008.

After the death of its legendary co-founder Jane Addams in 1935, Hull-House trustees had to determine what role, if any, the old thirteen-building complex could play in the neighborhood that was being transformed by super highways, public housing, and the loss of population. They did so in the context of two historical movements: the migration of African Americans from the south to the urban North, that more than any other issue in the 1940s and 1950s challenged the deepest felt values and goals of the social settlement movement; and, the rising demand in local communities to democratize community organizations or agencies.

These two movements intersected in urban neighborhoods in the United States where the possibility of large-scale urban redevelopment threatened the status quo, especially the racial composition of communities. Hull-House, situated in such a neighborhood on Chicago’s Near West Side, decided to integrate and democratize its programs and staff, to remain in the neighborhood[1]; to support public housing; and to work with the neighborhood to develop a community-based plan for urban renewal.

The major tool to accomplish the goals of integration, democratization, and community renewal, was an entity called the Near West Side Planning Board, an agency that was to be separately incorporated and independent of the settlement, but initially received staff and financial support. With this Planning Board, Hull-House hoped to create a process that would lead to vastly different outcomes from the typical model of urban renewal where land clearance and private development ignored the population being displaced. Instead, evoking the innovative spirit of the settlement movement as a vanguard of new social relationships in a democracy, Hull-House sponsored what it hoped would be an open and democratic process that could be used throughout the United States. It was to include all elements of the community with the result that redevelopment would occur without displacement. The people of the neighborhood would be able to reap the rewards of the renewal rather than be forced out by rising real estate values and dispersed to other low-rent neighborhoods. This paper uses the case study of this community-based planning experiment to ask broader questions about community re-building in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century American cities.

Without spending too much time on background, it seems important to comment on how the Hull-House settlement actually functioned in the neighborhood. [2] In 1935, The Hull-House settlement had existed for forty-five years as a private, not-for-profit association governed by a board of seven trustees, including Jane Addams who called herself “head resident” and did not take a salary. She was, until 1907, both the president and the treasurer of this board. The majority of the trustees had held their positions from the 1890s—when the system was put into place—until Jane Addams’s death in 1935, or, if they preceded her, their own death. The trustees, during the Addams’s years, were women and men who overall can be described as wealthy civic-minded progressives who were responding to the evils of the industrial city. Addams, one of their class,[3] had established the settlement with her own funds and they backed her “experiment” and accepted her leadership. Since Addams was a volunteer who invested her own money in the settlement, she fit a model of womanly benevolence not one of professionalism. The trustees were there to offer advice and counsel, not to supervise or to develop policy, unless asked directly. Addams, then, had a great deal of personal discretion and reigned almost completely unchallenged by the close-knit group of trustees.[4] In addition, Hull-House was not affiliated with a religious denomination or a university so had an enviable independent position. The meteoric rise to international prominence that Addams and the settlement achieved also gave her a protected status.[5] After her death, there were no head residents (now called directors) of equal stature or, obviously, whose relationship to the trustees had an equivalency.[6] This was very empowering for Addams and, I would argue, gave her the ability to speak out on many controversial stands without fear of reprisal, and to defend the rights of political dissidents worldwide. It allowed her to personally ally herself with unpopular causes and individuals, to establish radical organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and to maintain a large degree of freedom for the individual residents who came to live in the Hull-House complex. [7]

Hull-House was also a meeting place for unpopular groups from the neighborhood. Yet there was no thought that an individual who lived in the neighborhood and was active in the settlement should take a place on the board of trustees until 1943 when Alex Elson, who had grown up in the neighborhood and participated in Hull-House as a youngster, was selected by the board of trustees.[8]

The trustees had traditionally been among the settlement’s major contributors: multi-millionaire heiress and leading civic reformer Louise Bowen, who continued to dominate the trustees until her death in 1953; Mary Rozet Smith, Jane’s life partner and daughter of Smith Bragner, one of the country’s paper manufacturers ; Helen Culver, the heir of the Charles Hull real estate empire, and owner of the Hull homestead[9] and the property surrounding it; Mary Wilmarth[10], a feminist clubwoman and one of Hull-House’s earliest supporters; Julius Rosenwald, who owned Sears Roebuck, Co., and was a leading philanthropist known for his support of education for African Americans in the South and his sponsorship of the NAACP; and Sewell Avery, president of the U.S. Gypsum Company and Chairman of the Board of Montgomery Ward & Company. Completing the list of trustees were the philosopher John Dewey, wealthy businessmen and art patrons Edward B. Butler and Charles L. Hutchinson, and Allen B. Pond, architect.

When old-timers died, they were replaced by other family members or individuals well-known to those on the board. Charles Hull Ewing “replaced” his cousin, Helen Culver; Louise Bowen added her daughter Helen Bowen Blair in 1929 when the number of trustees increased from seven to nine.[11]

In the 1940s, when the number of actual trustee slots increased to 25, the categories of people who served expanded to include individuals who were prominent in the social welfare field as practitioners or professors, often who had been Hull-House residents in their younger years; less than a handful [four] of prominent African Americans [Robert R. Taylor, president of the Chicago Housing Authority; the Rev. Nathan A. Scott, professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School; Dr. Lloyd A. Hall, chemist; and journalist Era Bell Thompson] and a group of businessmen and their wives, primarily real estate developers, who held prominent roles in metropolitan Chicago’s planning circles (James C. Downs, Jr.; Anthony Downs; Ruth Camp, wife of J. Beidler Camp; Harry Goldstine; Mrs. Ferd Kramer); and prominent liberals including Adlai Stevenson and Marshall Field, III.

The original “residents”[12] of the settlement -–young women and men-—mainly affluent and well-educated—following the example set by Jane Addams, had included radicals, socialists, labor leaders and social reformers. The cross-class, cross-cultural relationships that were forged with the neighbors were intended to be cooperative rather than paternalistic, friendly rather than officious, and, at best, democratic in spirit.

Yet from the beginning, the neighborhood became a laboratory and the studies produced by the residents launched reform campaigns that would eventually transform the neighborhood, but for the first forty-five years or more, without neighborhood-led participation in the development of social policy. [13]

Under Charlotte Carr’s administration, serious efforts were made to reverse this pattern and to democratize Hull-House within itself as well as in its relationships with the community. Of course, a large aspect of that effort was to change race relations within the settlement itself and in the neighborhood. Arriving in October 1937, Carr, who had been the executive director of the New York City emergency relief bureau, openly advocated New Deal-style cultural expression and workers’ education, as well as civil rights. Carr’s approach to the race issue as administrator of emergency relief in New York had impressed Dorothy Height, the civil rights leader who had witnessed Carr’s fairness toward blacks during the March 1935 riot in Harlem. The situation in March of 1935 was desperate for African Americans. While blacks were only 8 percent of New York City’s population, they made up 42 percent of the unemployed on welfare. They were even denied positions on work projects set up by the welfare system and there was not a single person of color in a position of authority on the management staff of the Welfare Administration. Carr remedied the problem by appointing Height to be personnel supervisor in the central office of the Home Relief Bureau.[14]

The African American community in Chicago anticipated her move to the city. Carr’s network of labor and civil rights leaders and her friendships with these leaders were comparable to the kinds of inter-racial networks Jane Addams had formed at the high point of her influence, the difference being, of course, that Addams was a charismatic leader and that Carr never achieved that kind of recognition or influence. Jane Addams by 1912 had forged relationships with the black leadership and Hull-House was one of those places in a segregated world where African American women and men felt welcome. Addams co-existed with the contradictions that were part and parcel of Jim Crowism, was one of the founding members of the NAACP, but was unable to integrate Hull-House. Instead the work done by Hull-House among blacks, who by 1925 had settled in significant, although small numbers, south of the settlement[15], was carried out through the medium of the Hull-House Community Club, an organization of women affiliated with the State and National Federation of Colored Woman’s Clubs.[16] The Hull-House Community Club’s members remained a separate [and segregated] club in the settlement house from the late 1920s thru the early 1950s.[17] Their children were kept separate rather than encouraged to join in the myriad of clubs and activities available for White children. The persistence of ethnically separate activities at Hull-House in the 1930s and 1940s points to deeper and more complex cultural and racial issues.[18]

One of Carr’s first moves to integrate was to invite the first African American to Hull-House as a resident. She sought out Chicago Defender journalist Dewey E. Jones and his family, got a Rosenwald Fund stipend to cover his salary, and announced that Jones was going to investigate the conditions of African Americans in the neighborhood of Hull-House. Jones, who had been an advisor to Harold Ickes in Washington, D.C.,[19] was a good choice as the first African American resident at the House. Jones, his wife, Faith Jefferson Jones, a social worker; and their toddler, Dewey E. Jones, Jr., moved into the settlement in 1938. Jones’s sudden death in April 1939, ended his work at Hull-House.[20]

Carr combined her efforts to integrate with community organization initiatives. Carr established a community relations department in 1939. Under the sponsorship of this department, two small neighborhood centers were started and operated by parents and a staff of neighborhood leaders who were made available by the Works Project Administration. One center was in the African American district south of the settlement and filled a need that had long been recognized by the Hull-House Community Club. As mentioned above, the Community Club had met since the 1920s, but had not been incorporated into the settlement life. Carr reversed this by empowering the African American women who were club members to run this new center located in their own neighborhood, with WPA and Hull-House funds. The women also reached out to African American businessmen who helped with funding. Activities within the center included a morning pre-school play group, afternoon game periods for school children, weekly dances and English classes for adults, with WPA leadership supervised by the Recreation staff of Hull-House. A mother’s club had been organized and was sponsored by members of the Hull-House Community Club. Carr felt that this center represented an activity where neighborhood leaders were making plans for themselves and carrying them out, with minimum guidance from Hull-House.[21]

Carr’s tenure with Hull-House ended in December 1942, after only five years, and, according to Carr, she had been fired.[22] There were charges of budget extravagance under Carr’s administration, but the record indicates that there was no budget crisis.[23] Bowen was offended by Carr’s politics, did not articulate what I believe was Carr’s real sin: successful efforts at organization and empowerment of the neighborhood. This would have been threatening in itself, but Carr believed that the neighborhood people must participate fully in the affairs of the settlement. She saw Hull-House as the community’s organization. Her boldness in this direction, political columnist Sydney J. Harris argued, “often antagonized some board members, as did her insistence upon entering political controversies when she felt the welfare of ‘the little people was at stake’”[24] since she believed that she, as director of Hull-House, represented the little people against the special interests.

While many people who agreed with her approach liked to say she was carrying out the legacy of Jane Addams, Carr was attempting something very different from the kind of social relations Addams established with the neighborhood. Commenting on the departure of Carr, a member of the West Side Community Committee [different from the West Side Community Organization], who had spent his life in the neighborhood, said the fundamental issue was “who shall formulate the policies of Hull House? Does Hull House belong to the people it serves, or to the trustees? Shall it be an ‘agency’ superimposed from above; or shall it be an instrument of the people themselves? Only by involving the people significantly in the management of Hull House can it ever become a real part of the attitudes, sentiments and thinking of the people.” [25]

Other social settlements faced the same challenges in the 1930s and 1940s, but few actively pursued a policy of integration or of democratization. Newer kinds of community organizations, like Anthony Sorrentino’s West Side Community Organization, developed out of University of Chicago sociologist Clifford Shaw’s Chicago Area Project, emerged to challenge the hegemony of established settlements like Hull-House. The West Side Community Organization was a group predominantly of neighborhood people of Italian background that emerged in the late 1930s as an alternative to the “traditional” top-down social agency approach. What is interesting about Hull-House settlement in this period is how the directors, staff, and residents attempted to move away from the top-down model while still retaining controls that resembled the top down model of a social agency.

One of the Hull-House residents who advocated for community organization was Eri Baker Hulbert, III, the grandnephew of Jane Addams. From 1937-1940, he was counselor and head of tenant selection for Jane Addams Homes for the Chicago Housing Authority. The Homes were located in the Near West Side neighborhood less than a half mile west of the settlement complex.

It was Eri Hulbert who was given the task in 1947 of working with the other community organizations in the neighborhood. The major one was Sorrentino’s West Side Community Organization, mentioned above. This organization, rather than a club that came out of Hull-House, initiated discussions with the settlement about ways to cooperate in a community planning effort. While the West Side Community Organization clearly satisfied the agenda of democratization and had well-developed neighborhood leadership that would become significant for the effort to employ community-based planning for urban renewal when the Near West Side was challenged by large-scale land clearance plans, the organization also promoted a narrow vision of what constituted the neighborhood and ultimately made inter-racial cooperation, in response to the migration of African Americans from the South untenable.

The years of the experiment with community-based planning occurred during the directorship of Russell W. Ballard. With Carr gone, and with her the majority of the residents and staff who sided with her, also departed[26], Hull-House returned to its former traditions, with minor revisions.[27] The trustees regrouped, appointed an interim director, and carefully sought out the next permanent director.[28] The board ignored the community’s demands to have input in the selection of the next Hull-House director.[29] The 25-member trustee board had become more of a policy-generating group; there was much more bureaucracy and officers of the “corporation” now included a president, three vice-presidents, a secretary, a treasurer, and an assistant treasurer. The director was more formally scrutinized by the board and was increasingly treated as a paid employee in the corporate model. Louise Bowen was president and treasurer.[30]

Russell Ballard, a civil rights advocate who easily fit the Hull-House board’s qualification that the director of Hull-House “defend the rights of all racial, religious and economically disadvantaged groups as Hull-House has done in the past,”[31] succeeded Carr and continued to push for improved race relations in the neighborhood and for greater progress in the integration of the settlement and its programs. His ability to speak out, however, and to initiate programs was hampered by the board’s committee system. The conservative tendencies of the board were strengthened in the cold war anti-communism and red-baiting that accelerated in the post-World War II decades. These trends were apparent during Charlotte Carr’s administration and she, like many pragmatic Left-leaning New Dealers attempted to distance herself from Communist-front groups and the Communist Party.[32]

Additionally, Ballard functioned in an atmosphere of increased racial tension in the United States. For Chicagoans and others in urban centers in the North, the Detroit race riot of 1943 was a frightening example of what might happen locally. Chicago’s Mayor Edward Kelley appointed a Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations [later the Chicago Commission on Human Relations] immediately after the events in Detroit. Ballard and his assistant director, Elaine Switzer, were active in the expanded work on race relations undertaken by the Council of Social Agencies of Chicago.[33] It was, however, in the day-to-day activities that Ballard, Switzer, and Robert Mulligan were immediately responsible that the work of race relations found its practical expression. “Because people attend a settlement house voluntarily, working with any group in an interracial setting calls for statesmanship of the highest order,” Ballard wrote.[34] Ballard and his staff had to combat the withdrawal of Whites from programs as the neighborhood became increasingly influenced by the rumor that “Hull-House was ‘being ruined by the Mexicans and Negroes.’”[35]

One of the Hull-House staff, Arthur Ferrell, had been stabbed when he was escorting a group of African American boys to their homes after a Hull-House activity. Occurring in 1952, it was the first incident of an attack on a member of the Hull-House staff. Hull-House trustee Robert R. Taylor, an African American who was president of the Chicago Housing Authority board, encouraged Ballard to deal with the incident through the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations since the commission “had stepped in quietly in other areas at early signs of tension and had been able to help the local agencies work out constructive programs which appeared to allay unrest and lessen the tensions.” The trustees also urged Ballard to press the police for a thorough investigation.[36]

Two years later, after more than fifty years of ethnic and race segregation, a new formula was tried out with the teams in the gymnasium. Each team was made up of boys from all racial groups in an effort to secure integration of all groups in the neighborhood. Later reports indicated the progress was slow.[37] Out of frustration with the slow pace of interracial progress, Russell Ballard suggested that Hull-House begin to follow the lead of other settlement houses and extend their work directly into public housing projects where the need for service was so great.[38]

Eri Hulbert was well aware of the racial tensions in the Near West Side long before he agreed to take the staff position of executive director of the Near West Side Planning Board. The Italians did not want the African American community that was south of Roosevelt Road, a major racial boundary, to move into the area they saw as their own turf. The public housing projects were a potential source of racial change in the neighborhood, so while affordable public housing was a reasonable alternative for the blighted housing on the Near West Side, it was an unacceptable solution for the Whites that lived in the neighborhood and were the potential participants in community-based planning. Attempting to bring together individuals from all sections and elements of the Near West Side community so that a planning board could begin with solid commitment behind it, his past involvement with the Jane Addams Homes in the neighborhood, and Hull-House’s advocacy of public housing, worked against him. Father Barton, parish priest at Holy Family Church, a key institution in the neighborhood, disseminated blatantly hostile stories in his parish newsletter indicting Hulbert and Hull-House for their Left-wing politics and their advocacy of more public housing in the neighborhood. (Barton called it socialized housing.) In 1938 Barton had stopped the CHA from extending the Jane Addams Homes, an effort that Hulbert, as service director of the Homes, and Hull-House, as a willing intermediary for the CHA in the neighborhood, had favored.[39]

Hulbert produced a brochure to introduce the community planning board idea to the neighborhood. It indicates his grasp of the problems involved with creating an organization from scratch; of offering new and relatively technical information to people from all educational backgrounds and viewpoints; of the inherent structural problems of dealing with the new local, federal, and state bureaucracies pertaining to planning; and of the difficult distinction between creating a vehicle for the community to talk out and reconcile its differences over planning, constructing the planning board itself;, and finally, presenting a plan that would be implemented by other private and public partnerships. It was a very big meal for the community to digest.

The brochure tantalizingly explained that the private investors who could receive land from the Land Clearance Commission might be a neighborhood redevelopment corporation, an insurance company, or any individual, association or corporation set up legally to invest in housing in Illinois, including cooperatives and veterans’ groups. In essence, it could be the community itself. The brochure enumerated the funds available for redevelopment from state, federal, and city sources, and concluded: “These laws and this money plus private capital can result in new homes, more parks and schools, better business and industrial facilities on the Near West Side. They offer a unique opportunity for the pioneering of a new frontier in city building.”[40]

In the next seven years, Hulbert and a core group that functioned as an executive committee did a monumental job of getting the concept of community-based planning on the table. Hulbert was able to gain the attention of the public agencies involved in the urban renewal process and while there were no agreements written in stone, all along the way the Near West Side Planning Board felt that it had general approval of its overall direction. [41] This was an overly optimistic view.[42]

The process of interacting with the agencies was difficult for large-scale developers and, for a semi-professional group, as the Near West Side Planning Board was, having only limited support from local foundations, and a modest allocation annually from the Hull-House Association, the task was formidable.[43] In truth, the Planning Board had put off dealing with the really complicated problem of private capital once a plan was put in place. What made that an even more serious concern was the fact that in reality approval for a plan from the public agencies was based in large part on whether or not it was deemed realistic that the proposed project could be financed. The inability of the Planning Board to collect significant funds from the businesses in the redevelopment area was a sign of its weakness.[44]

Perhaps the most disconcerting outcome in 1950 of the two years of organizing and after “75 meetings, which had been attended by 248 different people and by a total of 778, exclusive of innumerable small conferences, exclusive of hours of volunteer time . . . exclusive of meetings called by other agencies in which the Planning Board participated and exclusive of a few Planning Board meetings of which accurate record was not made,”[45] was the realization that most people in the neighborhood were not interested in planning beyond their own block, or even their own piece of property.

The persistence of racism was undoubtedly the central problem in any kind of community planning in an area like the Near West Side. Hulbert and the core group[46] of Hull-House affiliated Planning Board members had to start the planning process in the place in which they found the community. While it was possible to include one or two African Americans, the other major interest group was the Italians. The reality was that the push from the Italian-dominated West Side Community Organization, and the churches in the neighborhood, was to focus on the much smaller area whose population was overwhelmingly Italian.[47]

Eri Hulbert was caught in a dilemma. He wanted to expand the horizons of the neighborhood and educate the people about the opportunities of planning, but he first had to gain their trust. The neighborhood felt that large-scale clearance was about to happen. So much of the neighborhood had become vacant already that this was not an unreasonable worry. Stimulated by this anxiety, a survey of property owners in the area was made with the help of a staff of local people hired and trained for the purpose. The information was to be mapped.

For the first time in two years, Eri Hulbert was energized and although he had pointed out the lack of money, lack of membership, and lack of action, and the persistence of racial tensions, he saw accomplishments: they were organizing the Planning Board itself; they had gotten industry, business, agencies and residents started in working together. Possibly the most important single concrete fact was the changed policy of the Central National Bank toward loans for home repair and home rebuilding.[48] Suddenly, in the face of the threat of losing the neighborhood, there was energy and hope for rehabilitation block by bloc, for conservation in selected blocks, for redevelopment.

Of course, this was putting the cart before the horse. There was no overall plan. How could any homeowner or business owner rely on the information from the various agencies when the City Council had not voted on a comprehensive plan for the city and the metropolitan area?[49]

To meet the insecurity that lurked underneath the frenzied activity to get maps readied and to showcase selected blocks where rehabilitation/conservation had been accomplished, the alderman of the ward introduced an ordinance into the City Council, the Pistilli Ordinance, bearing his name. The ordinance transformed the area bounded by Harrison Street, Halsted Street, Roosevelt Road, and Ashland Avenue from its blighted designation to be reclassified with certain exceptions as a proper area for rehabilitation of existing structures. [This eventually became the site of the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois.] The exceptions were the several blocks within the area where the structures were in such condition that it was economically unsound to undertake rehabilitation.[50] Hulbert and others on the Near West Side Planning Board had questions about how the Pistilli Ordinance would be implemented and worried about residents of the neighborhood investing in rehabilitation without real guarantees.[51]

More profoundly, the Hull-House trustees and their core supporters on the Near West Side Planning Board believed the motivation for the Pistilli Ordinance was anti-democratic. It was a way to keep out private projects that might allow interracial housing or even African American families to live in public housing along with White families. Ironically, Eri Hulbert found himself engaged in a “democratic” process in the development of the community-based planning board that was, in the final analysis badly flawed.

The Hull-House trustees were reluctant to sponsor or advocate measures that allowed for a kind of local option to impede the civil rights of minorities. [52] This tension between the will of the local people and the values of open housing and anti-discrimination as a non-negotiable part of public policy in the rebuilding of American cities has been the subject of many works in the field of urban history and urban studies.

By 1953-54, the Hull-House trustees were far less enamored with the possibilities of the Near West Planning Board. Rather than abandon their commitment to community planning, they sought for other ways to cultivate it. After years of involvement with the community, the trustees and staff of Hull-House returned to the drawing board and put together a citizen participation grant that was funded by the Schwarzhaupt Foundation; initially the grant was to be administered through the Near West Side Planning Board but, with the sudden and unexpected death of Eri Hulbert[53], the trustees’ discomfort with elements of the Near West Side Planning Board came to a head. Not being able to find among the Planning Board leadership anyone to replace Hulbert (who the trustees trusted and believed in) they moved to sidestep the group. A reorganized structure for the implementation of money from Schwarzhaupt for the development of citizen participation was accomplished and the Near West Side Planning Board officially severed its relationship with the Hull-House settlement in 1956. The new entity, the Citizen Participation Project, controlled entirely by the Hull-House Association, began anew; after hiring a professional community organizer, a series of community meetings to promote citizen participation were inaugurated![54] Hull-House’s commitment to community-based planning was to go on, but this time in a more controlled and focused approach.

These developments paralleled the change of direction for the neighborhood that was coming from the outside. In 1954, William Deknatel reported that James W. Follin, U.S. director of slum clearance and urban redevelopment, had been in Chicago during the past week talking with the Near West Side Planning Board, the Chicago Plan Commission and the Chicago Land Clearance Commission. It looked as if a firm commitment would result for the Hull House area to be one of two pilot urban renewal projects in the area when the housing bill now in Congress passed. Deknatel further reported that Mr. Follin was fairly sanguine about the prospects of the bill’s passage.”[55]

In 1956 the Harrison-Halsted area, the 55.5 acre tract of land that became in 1963 the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, was designated an urban renewal area. Reversing the agreements made locally through the City Council [Pistilli Ordinance] regarding the possibility of conservation and rehabilitation, the Chicago Land Clearance Commission now said that the project area was a slum and blighted area and eligible for redevelopment. [56]

Between 1957 and 1961, when it was first learned that the Harrison-Halsted area was being considered as the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, several initiatives for redevelopment were on the table. The site conservation report for Harrison-Halsted could be read two ways: from the point of view of big-picture urban planning, the finding that “most of the structures in the project area and the living units contained in the structures have deteriorated to a degree where rehabilitation or conservation would not be an economic procedure”[57] opened up all kinds of possibilities; from the viewpoint of the local residents who had been the most ardent supporters and participants in the Near West Side Planning Board, and who had been working under the assumption that many of them could rehabilitate their own homes and remain in the neighborhood, it was the beginning of a series of betrayals. There were also property owners in the neighborhood who saw a chance for financial gains as they contemplated the rise in property values that were outside of, but close to the area designated for large-scale redevelopment. But this was possible only if public housing was kept out.

Ultimately, the Hull-House trustees who were increasingly representative of a real-estate industry-led redevelopment of post-World War II metropolitan Chicago (reflecting the Richard J. Daley plan for urban rebirth) found that the role for Hull-House was to help federal, state, and municipal authorities demolish the neighborhood[58] that had been the focus and the context of the settlement experience between 1889 and 1959. James C. Downs, Jr., who served as president of the Hull-House Association in 1959,1960, and 1961, the crucial years in which the fate of the neighborhood was decided, was a downtown realtor who had also made a name for himself as the head of Real Estate Research Corporation, the firm that had done the original site studies for the proposed Chicago-area campus of the University of Illinois. He began his association with Hull-House sometime in the mid-1950s. He had become one of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s closest advisors. The other trustees in 1957-1960 included: the wives of realtors Jay Beidler Camp and Ferd Kramer. (Kramer, who was involved in some capacity in almost every major redevelopment project in Chicago, served as president of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Commission and in 1941 with Holman Pettibone, and Newton Farr, helped guide Chicago’s early renewal efforts. Kramer managed Lake Meadows, a project funded by New York Life, and developed Prairie Shores.) By the end of the 1950s, the Hull-House Trustees were reinventing the settlement by contemplating its removal from its historic site and its transformation into a social agency that served multiple constituencies in locations throughout the metropolitan area. The vision of settling as a bridge-building act undertaken to create cross-class and cross-ethnic and racial harmony and understanding had fallen away, replaced by strategies of delivering services in decentralized settings.

Deknatel, an architect whose widowed father, businessman Frederick Deknatel had become a resident of Hull-House in the 1900s, represented the ambivalent relationship the settlement had for a long time with the neighborhood. Deknatel played an increasingly significant role as a trustee and, finally, as president of the board of trustees of the Hull-House Association. He was intimately involved with the creation of the Temporary Organizing Committee, which became the Near West Side Planning Board. Deknatel was refreshingly transparent in a speech he made to the Hull-House trustees in 1947, as he explained the role that Hull-House would play:

With the beginning of planning there will be a series of battles. There will be inevitably serious disagreements about planning matters, both small and large. . . it will be you at Hull house who will be most capable of arbitrating these differences, because Hull House is the most disinterested agency in this community. It is the most disinterested because if our effort succeeds largely, it will put Hull House out of business, and I think that we can sincerely say that that would be a perfect conclusion to our efforts.[59]

This “disinterestedness” from the neighborhood was inherent from the beginning. From public baths to reformation of the juvenile court system, progressive reformers with deep roots in neighborhood settlements like Hull-House began the process of urban renewal in American cities in the 1890s when they first moved into neighborhoods like the Near West Side. One of the first playgrounds in Chicago was opened under the auspices of the Hull House settlement; it was “built” across the street from the settlement in a space created by the demolition of several slum flats owned by William Kent, a second-generation Chicago entrepreneur whose property holdings included badly maintained buildings in the slums. There is no record where the families moved who had lived in the hovels owned by Kent.[60] The expansion of the Hull-House settlement was an eighteen-year project in which slum buildings were demolished and replaced by the twelve additional structures that together made up the settlement complex. In creating this new neighborhood space that served educational, cultural, and recreational needs for thousands of families, the settlement added positive value to the district. It did not, however, add housing for the neighbors.[61] Nowhere in the process of “slum clearance” and replacement with new buildings that had new functions, did the settlement consult with neighbors.

Deknatel also indicated that Hull-House was not wedded to fighting for a plan that the neighborhood people endorsed but was deemed unacceptable by planning experts, or did not fit with a better, more comprehensive and metropolitan plan. When the possibility of rebuilding the neighborhood by eliminating it and establishing the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois in its place, Deknatel and others on the board of trustees of the settlement could argue that this was an acceptable outcome of urban renewal as the university plan had merit in a larger conceptualization of metropolitan planning and, furthermore, in its “disinterestedness,” the trustees could envision Hull-House Association providing services somewhere else. It was not tied to the neighborhood.

Two points should be made here. The first is that the Near West Side Planning Board, while unsuccessful ultimately, had positive outcomes as well. The Planning Board continued its work after 1955 because the heirs of Eri Hulbert had “bought” the concept of community-based planning. A number of the neighborhood leaders who had cut their teeth on the Planning Board’s activities, were in place to participate in other councils and commissions where places for community representation needed to be filled. The Planning Board continued to include individuals who were Hull-House residents and/or lifelong participants in the settlement. Ernest Giovangelo, his sister Florence Giovangelo Scala, and Jessie Binford were examples of the social citizenship and new social relations Jane Addams had hoped would evolve from the disinterested, neighborly and open-ended role of the settlement. Inspired by the reform spirit associated with Hull-House, Binford came to the settlement as a resident in 1902, from Marshalltown, Iowa. She became involved with the workings of the new system of juvenile justice and movement of prevention of juvenile delinquency and, in her capacity as head of the Juvenile Protective League (a Hull-House affiliate located in the settlement), she became an adviser and advocate for neighborhood families. Troubled by the professionalization of child welfare during the 1940s and the eclipse of the community work approach, Binford retired in 1952 but remained a resident of Hull-House.

In 1961, Binford joined Florence Scala to co-chair the Harrison-Halsted Community group in opposition to the clearance of the neighborhood for the construction of the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois. Binford wanted people to know that it wasn’t the Hull-House settlement that she was trying to save, but the neighborhood itself. [62]

The Giovangelos had grown up in the neighborhood with close ties to Hull-House, even though they also belonged to the Roman Catholic parish. Florence had a talent for acting and made close relationships with Hull-House residents who ran the theater arts department. It was with the Planning Board, however, that Scala fully realized her individual potential and began to understand the potential of democratic participation in social change. “To me,” she explained, [Hulbert] was a teacher and a persistent pioneer in this new idea that the people themselves must participate in the planning of their own communities.[63]

Florence’s brother, Ernest, became a community organizer and participated closely with Hulbert. Some considered Ernie the obvious choice as the new director of the Planning Board after the unexpected death of Hulbert. There were clear biases against Ernie from the settlement side, where it became clear that fear of loss of control of the Planning Board, with the appointment of a real community leader as the executive director, outweighed faith in community-based planning.[64]

Teaching that “the people themselves must participate in the planning of their own communities” was dangerous; by bolstering up the self-confidence of local leaders and supporting the neighborhood’s aspirations, Hull-House created a dilemma of major proportions. And this brings us to the second important point about the post-1955 planning process. Among the trustees of the settlement there was a split over what position to take when concrete proposals began to surface for the Harrison-Halsted site.

When they first heard that the neighborhood was considered as a site for the university, many trustees were shocked and greatly disturbed by the lack of a democratic process in making this proposal. This proposal came from left field; there had been numerous sites for the Chicago branch of the university proposed, vetted, and rejected, and there was still the possibility of a site near the central downtown that required the reorganization of railroad terminals. It had been touted as the best site. The sudden introduction of Harrison-Halsted was shocking since the City’s department of urban renewal, the Chicago Plan Commission, the Chicago Land Clearance Commission, and the Chicago Housing Authority had all had innumerable conversations with the community councils, including the Near West Side Planning Board, that envisioned some kind of project for Harrison-Halsted that combined clearance of slums, rehabilitation and conservation of viable structures, and a staged re-location and then return of displaced neighborhood people into residences they could afford.

Even the Hull-House trustees like James C. Downs, Jr., who were “insiders” in the urban renewal/planning circles of the City, had participated, seemingly in good faith, with the community.[65] As late as January 1960, Downs and the trustees were involved in developing a plan for a new cooperative housing development in the cleared land near Hull-House.[66] There had never been any talk about the possibility of the site as a campus for the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois.

All of this involvement with the community was interrupted when in April of 1960, leaks in local newspapers revealed plans to use the Harrison-Halsted site for a university campus. Confidential meetings were held in Downs’s downtown office with trustees from the settlement. [67] Between April and October of 1960, while James C. Downs, Jr., held the position of president of the Hull-House board of trustees and was a senior advisor to Mayor Richard J. Daley on urban renewal projects and clearly a participant in the inner circles of power surrounding the mayor, Hull-House trustees brooded and debated what position they should take regarding the proposal to build the University of Illinois campus on the Harrison-Halsted site and thereby destroy the residential community with whom the settlement had been engaged in active planning for improvements for more than a decade. Downs, who stepped down from the presidency at the crucial moment of the public announcement of the plan to build the university in the neighborhood, remained an active trustee, as did his son, Anthony.[68] Downs and his son, pushed for the board to remain neutral during the crucial months of negotiations between the City and the University of Illinois over the final resolution of site selection.[69]

In February 1961, pressure from trustees and staff to oppose the University of Illinois campus plan had gathered, as had the opposition from the neighborhood to both the plan and to the lack of leadership from Hull-House. A special committee was appointed from the board; it deliberated and came back with a resolution to oppose the university plan that ended with this statement:

For decades Hull House has been standing for democratic processes and has been endeavoring to teach them to the thousands of new Americans who have passed through its doors. In the tradition of Jane Addams, Hull house cannot stand by while a project is undertaken which, however worthy in itself, completely ignores these processes, and must oppose governmental actions which fail to consider the rights of the people affected.[70]

This resolution never got out of the boardroom; divided, the trustees negotiated their internal differences by continuing a public position of neutrality.[71] Hull-House resident Robert Mulligan despaired at the refusal of the Board to release the statement. He stated to the board that the people feel that part of the ‘greater good’ of the City of Chicago is good democratic government. They say they are not cattle or colonials, but people, and should be treated that way.”[72]

This board stance of taking no position on the proposed Chicago campus of the university was understood by the community as a betrayal of neighborhood interests and of the hard work of community-based planning that they had engaged in because, in part, they trusted Hull-House. The Hull-House staff, who continued to have close ties with the neighbors (and in many cases sided with the community against the trustees’ neutrality) considered the board, in the best reading of it, indecisive, and in the worst, betrayers and hypocrites.[73]

The settlement had been instrumental in organizing the neighborhood to accept the concept of planning; it had been the agent of change, of modernization, and ironically, the agent of an urban renewal project that destroyed rather than rebuilt the neighborhood. It was not that the neighbors had resisted change; they had played by the rules, worked with City officials and urban renewal agencies. Hull-House, from this point of view, was demonstrating that democracy did not work. On the other hand, the plans that were acceptable to the neighborhood leaders of the Harrison-Halsted area, did not work if your goal was to provide affordable and decent housing for the people who lived just a few blocks south across the race boundary of Roosevelt Road.

This leads to a consideration of whether or not community-based planning is an effective means for solving the problems of urban neighborhoods. The question of the unit of planning is very important. For Anthony Downs and his father, James C., and for William Deknatel and many others on the board of trustees of Hull-House, the neighborhood was not the defining unit. The well-being or common good of the metropolitan area, the more realistic measure for modern planners, required a broader universe of people, institutions, and resources than that which could be addressed in a neighborhood of a city. Were these men the villains of the tale? Initially in my research I found the juxtaposition of the real estate interests on the board of trustees and the self-consciously integrationist positions of Russell Ballard to be inexplicable. Why didn’t they fire him? What was going on? After unearthing the names of key civil rights leaders who were resident or trustee at Hull-House in the late 1930s thru 1950s, at the same time that James C. Downs Jr., and other real estate redevelopment/urban renewal promoters also served on the board, it hit me that this was, in fact, one of the “accomplishments” of cold war liberalism as practiced by Ballard and the trustees at Hull-House. They were more on the same page than one might think. The essence of this liberal coalition was its accommodation to the private market; the integrationists like Ballard had nowhere to go but in the direction of men like Downs and Ferd Kramer of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Commission. He and his wife, who served as a Hull-House trustee, were a new breed of liberals willing to work for managed integration and who advocated private market solutions like Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores in Chicago to reconfigure what had been blighted communities. They did not solve the public housing dilemma, but they created the market for middle-class professionals of both races to have greater choices in the post-World War II housing market. These liberals, who would be awarded human relations commendations from the Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights do not look very much like civil rights leaders to me; yet the other side of the private market, the real estate block-busters and red-lining mortgage agents, were betting on racism to win out.

At Hull-House the race relations specialists, the reformers and idealists, and the liberals who believed in an interracial society inhabited public space in an often polarized, violent urban landscape. Those individuals, idealists like Russell Ballard and Eri Hulbert, who gave their energies to creating vehicles for the development of community leaders and who placed their hopes on the democratic process had to question what went wrong in the Hull-House neighborhood that produced racism rather than tolerance and cloaked this racism in community-based planning processes. This is not to say that all of the participants in the Near West Side Planning Board were opposed to breaking down the color line. That would be a gross overstatement. Yet in the overly narrow focus on a block- by- block approach to conservation and rehabilitation, they selected a small subsection of the Near West Side as their universe. They were aided by federal and state legislation that had built-in local control at crucial stages of redevelopment to satisfy the political forces who fought to keep the racial status-quo. And here again the Hull-House case is instructive. As a settlement house that had a long history of opening its doors to all, it had dealt with the race and ethnic conflicts in the neighborhood by not forcing integration; clubs were self-perpetuating “blocks” in the neighborhood, first because of barriers of languages, but then by the persistent weight of old fashioned prejudices. To counter this, Hull-House had a great variety of programs and activities where there was a mix of the smaller homogeneous groups.

These opportunities for cross-race, cross-ethnic interactions led to friendships and a greater understanding of the importance of respect for all people. Certainly, these experiences made it possible for the neighborhood to value itself and seek a plan to remain a community rather than leave for suburbia. But it also made it possible for old identities to be valorized and for community-based planning to be hampered by the legacy of racism. This paper could only begin to explore the possibilities and limits of community-based planning in an urban neighborhood that encapsulated in its space almost all the fault lines and tensions of American society. It is a cautionary tale to consider when we assume that “power to the people” can lead to better planning processes than those framed by technocrats and professional planners.

[1] The trustees demonstrated ambivalence on this issue. On the one hand, although there had been discussions at different times from the 1930s regarding the future of the settlement house, the records of the Hull-House Association make it clear that investment in the old buildings and efforts to develop new programs and to adapt to the changing demography of the area continued unabated until the decision to clear 55 acres of land, including the land in which the thirteen Hull-House buildings stood to make way for construction of the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois, had been made by the University and the City of Chicago. On the other hand, influential board leaders like William Deknatel and James C. Downs, Jr., did not identify Hull-House with the neighborhood.

[2] We need to separate the settlement from its founder, the legendary American heroine, Jane Addams, who is depicted as the quintessential social philosopher of democracy by many recent scholars. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams And the Dream of American Democracy. Basic Books, 2002; Charlene Haddock Seigfried. Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric. The University of Chicago Press, 1996; Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

[3] Addams, the daughter of an Illinois State Senator and businessman who died in 1881, inherited a portion of his estate and was able to restore the old Hull home’s interior and contribute to the settlement budget, albeit with contributions from others, until about 1895. Addams was clearly a privileged woman who did not need to work; she was not, however, rich, as attested to the small amount of property and outright cash she had at the time of her death.

[4] The one exception to this is the relationship she had with Helen Culver; the incorporation of Hull-House in 1895 was a condition imposed by Culver before she would make a permanent relationship with Addams who, from 1889, had leased the house and had negotiated for each new lot for the expansion of the complex. Allen B. Pond to Helen Culver, April 18, 1906. JAMC Reel 4-1331, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC. See also: Jane Addams Memorial Collection correspondence, 1889, reel 2. Letters to landlord Helen Culver from Jane Addams in March 1890. Through the early years Addams struggles to get Culver to donate rent and eventually more buildings, finally convincing her after several years to offer some of the lots on the block for sale. See especially letter from Jane Addams to “Dearest” (Mary Rozet Smith) March 23, 1898, JAMC reel 2.

[5] There were always critics, but Addams did not experience serious and sustained criticism until her pacifism during World War I. This was a difficult period for her personally but in an extraordinary demonstration of loyalty, Louise deKoven Bowen, a pro-war Progressive, stood by Addams and continued to fund the settlement as well as raise money from others, defending her friend and colleague at every turn. Louise deKoven Bowen, “Letter About Hull House,” in volume 2 of Speeches, Addresses, and Letters of Louise deKoven Bowen, ed. Mary Humphreys (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers, 1937): 789-92.See Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams. (Chicago: Ivan Dees, 2000), pp. 251-281, for a discussion of the attacks on Addams.

[6] Adena Miller Rich is the exception that proves the pattern. As the immediate successor to Addams, this Hull-House resident who headed the Immigrants’ Protective League, an affiliated agency at the settlement that had a national reputation in the field, Rich reluctantly agreed to takeover after Addams’s death, but insisted that she be a part-time, unpaid head resident The Welfare Council of Chicago urged the trustees to find a full-time paid professional as this was becoming the trend in settlements. Charlotte Carr and Russell Ballard called themselves directors and received executive salaries. HHA Minutes of Special Meeting of Trustees, August 2, 1935; HHA Minutes, Jan 8, 1937, HHA Box 1, Folder 5;

[7] For example, no one dared suggest that Professor Robert Morss Lovett, of the University of Chicago,t and his wife, Ida, leave Hull-House, where they had resided for many years, when the American Legion accused him of disloyalty. Trolander, Settlement Houses and the Great Depression, 104-105.

[8] Alex Elson Oral Interview transcript, OH-074 [interviewed by Stuart J. Hecht] October 12, 1980, 13, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[9] The Hull homestead was the building where Jane Addams and Ellen G. Starr opened the settlement house in 1889. For a good biography of Helen Culver see: Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, editors, Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary 1790-1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 20010.

[10] See the biographical entry of Wilmarth in Women Building Chicago. Wilmarth, among other distinctions, was the mother-in-law of Harold Ickes, a young Chicago lawyer who later went to Washington D.C.

[11] This data has been gathered primarily from the Minutes of the Hull-House Association, the Hull-House Year Books and Bulletins: April 25, 1895, March 14, 1903; April 14, 1903; October 15, 1907; January 27, 1908; April 14, 1908: October 30, 1928; November 1, 1928; April 9, 1929; June 18, 1929; October 29, 1929; April 29, 1930;May 27, 1935, Board of Trustees’ Minutes, Hull-House Collection, Dept. of Spec. Collections, Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC); Hull-House Bulletin 3, no. 12 (November and December 1899): 4. Biographical information on Sewell Avery: Marquis, Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; for Helen Bowen Blair: Marquis, Who’s Who Chicago and Illinois, 1945; “Helen Culver Funeral To Be Held Saturday.” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 20, 1925, pg. 10; “Helen Culver Leaves U. of C. $600,000.” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 14, 1925, pg. 1; “C.L. Hutchinson, Banker, Is Dead. Long Active in Civics, Art, and Charities.” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 8, 1924. pg. 1. See biographies of Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, Louise deKoven Bowen and Helen Culver in Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary 1790-1990 edited by Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

[12] Residency was a major function of the settlement house movement. It was a program that socialized hundreds of women and men from privileged and educated backgrounds and promoted ideas that we now associate with the liberal welfare state. Hull-house records on residency are incomplete, but minimally, there were 350 residents by 1930. My own research of residency at Hull-House from 1889 to 1963 lists more than 750 names, with varying amounts of biographical information. In 1935 there were 65 residents, of whom 45 were women and 20 were men, two were children; thirteen had arrived that fall; in 1943 there were 86 adults and 7 children; in 1946 there were 102 adults and 8 children. Hull-House Residents 1889-1929, Hull-House Collection, folder 294, Special Collections, Daley Library, UIC; Hull-House Year Book Forty-Fifth Year, 1934; “Report to Hull-House Trustees,” November 27, 1935, Adena Miller Rich Papers, Folder 17, Special Collections, Daley Library, UIC; Russell W. Ballard to the Board of Trustees, HHA, January 27, 1947, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum.

[13] [Residents of Hull-House] Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together With Comments and Essays On Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions [HHM&P] (New York and Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1895); Mary Jo Deegan argues that the Chicago School of Sociology at the University of Chicago in its early days was influenced by the work undertaken at Hull-House and that the early men of the Chicago school had the “same ideal, to bring sociological knowledge to everyday life to enable people to make intelligent decisions. . . .” Deegan, Jane Addams and The Men of the Chicago School, 41. Hull-House residents continued to use the settlement neighborhood as a field of study: Breckinridge, Sophonisba P. and Edith Abbott. “Chicago Housing Conditions: The West Side Revisited.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 17, no. 1 (July 1911): 1-34. Hull-House residents along with Jane Addams inspired the establishment of the City Homes Association in Chicago which sponsored research, again using the neighborhood and other districts of Chicago, and published Robert. Hunter, Tenement Conditions in Chicago. City Homes Association, 1901. At the time Hunter, who continued his career in New York City, was a Hull-House resident. Hull-House resident Edith Abbott revisited the neighborhood and other districts in Chicago in Abbott, Edith. The Tenements of Chicago: 1908-1935. University of Chicago Press, 1936. Recent sociological studies refer to both the neighborhood and the literature that has emerged about it: Gerald D. Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. University of Chicago Press, 1973, 1968.

Hunter, Albert. Symbolic Communities: The Persistence and Change of Chicago’s Local Communities. University of Chicago Press, 1974; Gregory D. Squires, Larry Bennett, Kathleen McCourt, and Philip Nyden. Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline. Temple University Press, 1987; Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel. Columbia University Press, 1993.

[14] Dorothy Height, Open Wide The Freedom Gates (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2003) 54.

[15] Hull-House Year Book, 1925, 23: “In recent years there has been a rather large influx of colored people into the neighborhood. While this club is relatively new it has made an excellent beginning. Its program includes sewing, cooking, wax-work and recreational activities.” Italians made up twenty-six percent of the Near West Side population while African Americans represented eight percent of the population in 1930. Louis Wirth and Margaret Furez, eds. “Near West Side,” Local Community Fact Book 1938 (Chicago: Chicago Recreation Commission, 1938.

[16] Hull-House Year Book, Fortieth Year, 1930, 27; Hull-House Year Book, Forty-second Year, 44; Donna Hodgman, “Hull-House Community Club Believes in Work As Well As Play.” HH Block News, vol. 2, No. 9, Feb. 10, 1939, 2-3.

[17] Articles in the Chicago Defender about the club never identify its being all black as a problem and there were also reports that when national associations of African American women held their meetings in Chicago, the Hull-House settlement was a sought-after venue for part or all of the programs. This brings up the whole question of how in a segregated society a White institution like Hull-House could promote respect and acceptance of a black-only group; in this case anti-discrimination meant being willing to let African American community groups share space with Whites.

[18] Hull-House Year Book Forty-Second Year, 1931-32, 43; : “One afternoon a month all of the women who have afternoon classes at the House and in periods of unemployment the men as well, have an afternoon social at which refreshments are served and a special program is carried out. The last celebration of Washington’s birthday was especially successful both for its historical presentation and its air of jollity. The group of women represented Mexicans, Italians, Greeks, Bohemians, Germans and Lithuanians.” (Hull-House Year Book, Fortieth Year, 1930, 27; Hull-House Year Book, Forty-fifth year, 44, 35; Donna Hodgman, “Wide Interest Shown In Revival of Greek Club,” Hull-House Block News, Jan. 27, 1939, Vol II, no. 7, 2; HHA Records, Scrapbooks-Press Clippings, Folder 523, West Side Times, 9-13-51;

[19] Harold Ickes, a Chicagoan with close ties to Hull-House and Jane Addams, had served as president of the local chapter of the NAACP. The Left-leaning New Deal networks had begun to include the black bourgeoisie; Hull-House was one of the connecting links in this new infrastructure, bringing blacks and whites together. Later on Robert E. Weaver, who also worked with Ickes, would live at Hull-House while he served as director of Community Services of the American Council on Race Relations in Chicago. Russell W. Ballard to the Board of Trustees, HHA, January 27, 1947, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum.

[20] David W. Kellum, “Death Claims Dewey R. Jones; Journalist is Buried After Simple Rites; Loses Fight With Death After Illness of Nine Days,” Chicago Defender, April 15, 1939, 1.

[21] Hull-House At the Fiftieth Year. May 1940.

[22] http://tigger.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/urbanexp/main.cgi?file=new/subsub_index.ptt&chap=130. This is an article written by Alexander Gourse for Urban Experience: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods 1889-1963, an educational and research website edited by Rima Lunin Schultz for the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[23] Actually had a surplus, but still were faced with essential repairs; endowment was somewhat over $500,000; during 1943 they did not liquidate any endowment securities for current expenses. The increase in the value of the endowment fund came from higher market quotations for their railroad bonds and common stocks not because there were additions to the endowment in 1943. “Financial Statement Year Ended December 31, 1943,”HHA Trustees’ Annual Meeting, January 28, 1944, Hull House Collection.

[24] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job.” Chicago Daily News, Dec. 23, 1942, 1; 4, Folder 543, Hull House Collection, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[25] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job.” Chicago Daily News, Dec. 23, 1942, loc. cit.

[26] Some of the break-up of the New Deal group at Hull-House can be attributed to the loss of WPA funds as the New Deal came to an end.

[27] One of the most telling reversals was the return of the weaving room. Carr had taken a real dislike to the arts and crafts-type approach to workers in the neighborhood and had removed much of the Labor Museum arts and crafts and utilized the space for industrial skills training and meeting rooms for groups of men who were unemployed. The weaving room after her departure was revitalized. Esther Wendel Oral Interview Transcript [interviewed by Mary Ann Johnson], July 11, 1984, page 2., Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[28] “Mrs. Ruth Camp To Act As Head of Hull House.” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1943, pg. 18; HHA Trustees’ Minutes, July 23, 1943, Hull House Collection; Council of Social Agencies report by Lucy P. Carner, sec. of Division on Education and Recreation, reported on Hull House June 16, 1943, Welfare Council Papers Box 330, Folder 2, Chicago History Museum.

[29] Hazel MacDonald, “Residents Ask for a Voice in Hull House,” Chicago Times, n.d., Near West Side Community Committee Records, Box 30, Folder 410.

[30] HHA Annual Meeting Minutes, March 26, 1943, Hull House Collection.

[31] This is from a statement of qualifications for the director of Hull-House, which was written by Dr. Wayne McMillen in 1943 for the personnel committee. McMillen was a University of Chicago sociologist who had become a trustee in 1939 on the suggestion of Charlotte Carr. HHA Trustees’ Special Meeting, March 27, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 25, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC; HHA Trustees’ Meeting, September 22, 1939.

[32] Sydney J. Harris, “Charlotte Carr Resigning From Hull House Job.” Chicago Daily News, Dec. 23, 1942, 1; 4, Folder 543, Hull House Collection; “Jane Addams Spirit in Carr Background.” American, December 26, 1942, Folder 543, Hull House Collection

[33] A Brief History of the Committee on Minority Group Relationships, Division of Education and Recreation, Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago.” October 1950, 1, Welfare Council Papers, Box 145, Folder 13, Chicago Historical Museum; HHA Trustees’ Minutes, September 24, 1943, Hull House Collection;

[34] Russell W. Ballard, “Hull-House Association Community Fund Service Report,” October 1951, Hull House Collection, Folder 10.)

[35] Russell W. Ballard, “Hull-House Association Community Fund Service Report,” October 1951, Hull House Collection, Folder 10.

[36] HHA Trustee’ Minutes, March 28, 1952, Hull House Collection, Folder 16; Russell W. Ballard, Hull-House Association Service Report, October 1952. Prepared for the Welfare Council and Community Fund, Folder 41, Hull House Collection.

[37] HHA Trustees’ Minutes, January 28, 1955, page 2 of Minutes, Hull House Collection.

[38] Russell W. Ballard, “The Director’s Report,” January 1957,” Hull House Collection, Folder 21.

[39] HHA Trustee’ Meeting, May 27, 1938, Folder 5, Hull House Collection; Eri Hulbert to William Deknatel, Feb. 21, 1949, Hull House Collection, Folder 383.

[40] “Who Will Plan to Rebuild the Near West Side?” [brochure], n.d. [October 1948] Near West Side Community Committee Records, Box 30. Folder 403.

[41] Near West Side Planning Board Meeting with Chicago Land Clearance Commission, November 22, 1949, Near West Side Community Committee, Box 41, Folder 564, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC; Executive Committee Meeting, Near West Side Planning Board, April 20, 1950, Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 41, Folder 565; William Deknatel, “The Near West Side Planning Board,” pg. 6, typescript, December 18, 1950, Folder 388, Hull House Collection. Note that in this typescript Deknatel writes: “It was [also] realized at once that there were numerous city agencies whose planning in broad aspects affects the future of the Near West Side in detailed application. [the Plan Commission, the Land Clearance Commission, the Chicago Housing Authority, the Department of Subways and Superhighways] It was important to establish working relationships with the city agencies, with a dual purpose: the first to learn from them, and in turn to inform the people, what plans they are making which affect the community; and the other to transmit to the city agencies an expression of needs developed through the Planning Board.” Also see: Eri Hulbert, executive director, to Ira Bach, Chicago Land Clearance Commission, June 6, 1951, Folder 389, Hull House Collection; Frederick T. Aschman, Chicago Plan Commission, to Ira J. Bach, Executive Director, Chicago Land Clearance Commission, January 11, 1954, Folder 395, Hull House Collection.

[42] Frederick T. Aschman, Chicago Plan Commission, to Ira J. Bach, Executive Director, Chicago Land Clearance Commission, January 11, 1954, Folder 395, Hull House Collection.

[43] HHA Trustees’ Minutes, Sept. 26, 1952, Hull House Collection, Folder 16; Minutes, HHA trustees’ minutes, January 25, 1952, Hull House Collection, Folder 16; HHA trustees’ minutes, December 3, 1954, Folder 18

[44] HHA Trustees’ Minutes, December 3, 1954, Folder 18, Hull House Collection; Near West Side Planning Board Meeting with Chicago Land Clearance Commission, November 22, 1949, Near West Side Community Committee, Box 41, Folder 564.

[45] Council Meeting, near West Side Planning Board, May 2, 1950, Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 41, Folder 566, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[46] In 1948 six subcommittees were authorized by the Temporary Organizing Committee for the redevelopment of the Near West Side, the precursor of the Near West Side Planning Board. They were: 1. Sub-Committee on Purpose, Policy and By-laws chaired by Russell Ballard and its members included Russell’s son John; HH residents Ruth Austin, Robert Mack, Helen Springer and Clara Stahl. Also HH resident and executive director of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations, Thomas Wright. Two “outsiders” were Fred Rosenberg, who was from the West Side Community Organization, and Ethel Clark, who was from the Newberry Center, a social settlement in the African American district south of Hull-House. The second sub-committee, On Industrial Contacts, was chaired by HH trustee Wallace Flower, a downtown investment banker, and had on its committee HH trustees Edward Blair, J. Biedler Camp and Bernard Schaar [all were either downtown or neighborhood-based businessmen]; Anthony Sorrentino was from the West Side Community Organization, but had grown up as the son of immigrants in the neighborhood; however, was employed by CAP after becoming a sociologist and graduating from U of Chicago. The other member was Walter Van Bergen. The sub-committee on mailings and records [a fancy name for secretarial???] was, unsurprisingly, composed of three women, with Florence Scala, who had roots in both the neighborhood and Hull-House. The other two women, Rosemary Horn and Constance Varelis were residents at Hull-House. The fourth sub-committee, on Studies in the Area, was chaired by William Jones, professional social worker and African American; the other members were Russell Ballard’s wife, Katherine; Ernest Giovangelo, brother of Florence Scala. HH resident Mary Gleason and a Pauline Lewis, who lived in the neighborhood were the other members. The fifth sub-committee, on materials, was chaired by Nick Taccio, one of the leaders of the West Side Community Organization and had on it the other members were Russell Ballard’s wife, Katherine; and Eleanor Wright, HH resident Thomas Wright’s wife. The sixth sub-committee, on Personnel, was chaired by Joseph Rovai, community leader; HH resident Jessie Binford; HH resident-staff & community person Frances Molinaro; Frank Gabit; Frank Paz, a leader of the Mexican community with long ties to Hull-House; William Ray and Lucy Solano. Of the entire group, the majority were Hull-House connected; the second group related to the West Side Community Organization, and most of them were Italians. “Temporary Organizing Committee for the Redevelopment of the Near West Side,” typed list, n.d. Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 30, Folder 403, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[47] Even after public meetings and major efforts to bring in other groups, the elected council of the Near West Side Planning Board was not very different from the core group at the start of the process.

[48] Council meeting minutes, Near West Side Planning Board, Inc., November 8, 1949, Near West Side Community Committee Records, Box 41, Folder 564, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[49] Declaration of Housing Policy for rehabilitation of An Area of the Near West Side, Nov. 18, 1949, Near West Side Community Committee Records, Box 41, Folder 564, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.

[50] Special meeting of the Planning Committee of the near West Side Planning Board, March 9, 1950, Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 41, File 565, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.

[51] Executive Committee Meeting, Near West Side Planning Board, April 20, 1950, Near West Side Community Committee records, Box 41, Folder 565, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.

[52] William F. Deknatel letter to Senator Robert McClory, Springfield, Illinois, April 16, 1953, Folder 41, Hull House Collection.

[53] I could find no evidence of the cause of death. I don’t have evidence of suicide, either, but in cases where letters, obituaries, memorial tributes, etc., absolutely are silent about cause or illness, accident or sudden hospitalization, it is not too remote a thought that this sensitive, overworked, incredibly idealistic, and very disappointed man would have taken his own life. “Eri Hulbert.” Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1955, pg. C10; See the Memorial Brochure in the Eri Baker Hulbert, III Papers, Spec. Coll., Daley Library, UIC.

[54] Minutes, HHA Trustees’ Minutes, December 3, 1954, Folder 18; Minutes, HHA board of trustees, April 29, 1955, Hull House Collection, Folder 19; Staff Chicago Land Clearance Commission, Site Designation Report for Slum and Blighted Area Redevelopment Project Harrison-Halsted,” September 12, 1956, pg. 3, Folder 394, Hull House Collection UIC; Minutes, HHA Board of trustees, October 26, 1956, Hull House Collection, Folder 20; Schwarzhaupt Committee Meeting Minutes, Dec. 19, 1956, Folder 392, Hull House Collection UIC; Bernard E. Schaar, “Comment on the Objectives of Schwarzhaupt Project,” January [7], 1957, Folder 392, Hull House Collection, UIC.

[55] HHA Trustees’ Minutes, April 30, 1954, Hull House Collection, Folder 18.

[56] Staff Chicago Land Clearance Commission, Site Designation Report for Slum and Blighted Area Redevelopment Project Harrison-Halsted,” September 12, 1956, pg. 3, Folder 394, Hull House Collection UIC.

[57] Staff Chicago Land Clearance Commission, Site Designation Report for Slum and Blighted Area Redevelopment Project Harrison-Halsted,” September 12, 1956, pg. 3, Folder 394, Hull House Collection UIC.

[58] “Hull House Eases Urban Renewal Fear.” Chicago Tribune, May 22, 1958, pg. E4

[59] William Deknatel, untitled typed manuscript, n.d., pg. 2. Hull House Collection, Folder 386, Spec. Coll. Daley Library, UIC.

[60] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 168-169

[61] The Jane Club had rooms for thirty young women. Helen Campbell, “The Jane Club and its Meaning.” The Interior (September 17, 1903).

[62] Florence Scala and Jessie Binford to Mrs. Emmett Dedmon, Paul Jans, HH Board of Trustees, March 27, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 27, Spec. Col., Daley Library, UIC; Jessie Binford to Mr. Jans, Marshalltown, Iowa, June 12, 1964, Folder 297, Hull House Collection.

[63] Remarks by Florence Giovangelo Scala, loc. cit.

[64] Minutes, HHA board of trustees, April 29, 1955, Hull House Collection, Folder 19 make it clear, even before Hulbert’s death, that the citizen participation aspect of the Planning Board was troublesome and needed intervention by professionals; a committee to supervise the original Schwarzhaupt grant for citizen participation was created so that Hull-House had control.

[65] Erwin Bach, “Push For U.S. Urban Aid in W. Side Area. Defense Mapped By Leaders.” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 13, 1957, W1; Minutes, HHA board of trustees, September 26, 1957, Hull House Collection, Folder 22;

[66] William F. Deknatel to James C. Downs, Jr., January 6, 1960, Folder 49, Hull House Collection.

[67] Minutes, HHA board of trustees, April 28, 1960, Folder 49, Hull House Collection.

[68] James C. Downs, Jr., to Mrs. Claire Dedmon, Secretary, February 10, 1961, Hull House Collection, folder 25; Minutes, Special Meeting HHA trustees, Feb. 13, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 25; Minutes, HHA trustees, February 23, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 25;

[69] “The answer of Hull-House to all inquiries about the position in this matter will be that so far the idea is only a proposal; and that when it becomes a definite plan the Hull-House board will take action and make its position known.” Minutes, HHA board of trustees, Sept. 29, 1960, Hull House Collection, Folder 24.

[70] Resolution Prepared by the Committee of the HHA Board of Trustees, February 10, 1961, Eri Baker Hulbert III Papers, Box 1, Folder 45.

[71] There were some trustees who opposed the “process” but thought the university plan a good one; others felt an obligation or responsibility to side with the neighbors; others wanted to salvage parts of the 13-building complex and hoped for leverage in negotiating with the university, should it be built, for inclusion of these buildings and also social work programs. These last mentioned trustees worried that taking a stance against the university prematurely would weaken Hull-House’s ability to negotiate.

[72] Minutes, HHA trustees, February 23, 1961, Hull House Collection, Folder 25.

[73] Minutes, HHA trustees, February 23, 1961, loc. cit.

[RS1]This has to be corrected

[RS2]Now know the connection.

[RS3]

November 7, 2007July 21, 2026

After Jane Addams: Life at Hull-House from New Deal to Great Society, 1930-1963

This post is by Rima Lunin Schultz and was first given at the Urban History Seminar, at the Chicago History Museum, on November 8, 2007

The three decades immediately following the death of its legendary co-founder Jane Addams in 1935 are generally viewed as a period of chaos and decline, followed by a period in which Hull-House became more of a community center with professional social work replacing the social activism of reform-minded residents. In this narrative of decline, boards of trustees became less interested in innovation and more concerned with what role, if any, the old thirteen-building complex could play in the neighborhood that was being transformed by super highways, public housing, and the loss of population. New research challenges that characterization and this evening I hope to outline the beginnings of a revisionist account.

The untold story of Hull-House in the Charlotte Carr and Russell Ballard eras is the story of how the most famous settlement house in the United States responded to the greatest historical movement of the mid to late twentieth century: the migration of African Americans from the south to the urban North. More than any other issue, the Second Great Migration to Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s challenged the deepest felt values and goals of the social settlement movement. With a contradictory legacy on the race question from the Progressive Era, Hull-House had to decide whether or not to integrate its programs and staff, remain in the neighborhood or move to another location; support public housing or give in to the local prejudices against blacks and whites living together. Other social settlements faced the same challenge and there are no examples, to my knowledge, where a policy of integration was chosen and, more importantly, that it was achieved to any degree. Abraham Lincoln Center, the Unitarian-affiliated social settlement begun by progressive era radical Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a close and valued friend of Jane Addams. Abraham Lincoln Center was strategically placed in the in-between space of black and white Chicago and from its beginnings promoted interracial democracy. It struggled to remain integrated, however, and by the 1930s had pretty much lost the battle.

While not perfect, Hull-House in the mid-1930s embraced a policy of integration and, in its programs, staffing, residency, and camp, achieved a greater degree of integration than has been acknowledged by any historians to this date. I am walking on egg shells here in my efforts to not overstate the successes of the program, but the efforts that were made were rather exceptional in the context of heightened violence against blacks when residential boundaries to enforce segregation were transgressed, and where openly defiant whites bullied the small number of black families who attempted to integrate public housing—housing built by the federal government.

Charlotte Carr, head resident from 1937 to 1942, was at first glance an unusual choice to lead in the post-Addams era. As the first full-time, paid head of the settlement she brought her experience as director of the Department of Labor under Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, a Left-of-center New Dealer, and as administrator of emergency relief in New York under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. An outsider to the social settlement network, she was not an outsider to circles of women activists. A graduate of Vassar, Carr’s early career brought her into contact with the women’s political culture of the Progressive Era. When she worked for Pinchot, she made a devoted friend of his wife, a radical feminist who encouraged Carr’s investigations in the coal mining regions of Pennsylvania and, when Carr was criticized, defended her; Carr also worked under Frances Perkins in New York State. Perkins had been in Illinois long enough to spend time at Hull-House and become part of the network of activist women that spanned two reform eras—from the 1890s through the New Deal. Such connections were valuable and made up for Carr’s lack of social settlement experience. Carr had ties to the New Deal, the labor movement (and its Left-leaning C.I.O.), and to pro-integrationist activism in the Northeast.

Carr’s approach to the race issue as administrator of emergency relief in New York had impressed Dorothy Height, the Civil Rights leader who had witnessed Carr’s fairness toward blacks during the March 1935 riot in Harlem. The situation in March of 1935 was desperate for African Americans. While blacks were only 8 percent of New York City’s population, they made up 42 percent of the unemployed on welfare. They were even denied positions on work projects set up by the welfare system and there was not a single person of color in a position of authority on the management staff of the Welfare Administration. Carr remedied the problem by appointing Height to be personnel supervisor in the central office of the Home Relief Bureau.

Her involvement with civil rights leaders was authentic—Race men and women trusted Carr, and when she was about to leave New York for Chicago, a farewell dinner was given in her honor. The invited guests included Robert Elzy, founder of the Urban League in Brooklyn, New York; Dr. Channing Tobias, an executive with the YMCA, Bessye Beardon, Harlem civic leader and mother of the artist Romare Beardon; James B. Hubert of the New York Urban League, A. Philip Randolph, and T. Arnold Hill. [1] The event was reported in the Chicago Defender and the African American community in Chicago anticipated her move to the city. Carr’s network of labor and civil rights leaders and her friendships with Frances Perkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Fiorello La Guardia were comparable to the kinds of networks Jane Addams tapped into at the high point of her influence. Jane Addams by 1912 had forged relationships with the black leadership and, when disgruntled after the Progressive Party convention they decided to caucus, they convened at Hull-House. It was one of those places in a segregated world where African American women and men felt welcome. This is not a declaration that progressive-era Hull-House was an integrated settlement—by no means was that the case. Jenkin Lloyd Jones wrote Addams a deeply critical letter in which he questioned whether he still recognized the Jane Addams he had come to admire and respect: how could she support Theodore Roosevelt, a racist, militarist? But Addams co-existed with the contradictions that were part and parcel of Jim Crowism. She managed to push a progressive agenda on TR, albeit lacking real assurances about suffrage and equality issues; at the same time to have high level policy discussions with W.E.B. DuBois. She was one of the founding members of the NAACP, wrote for The Crisis, engaged in debates with Ida B. Wells Barnett over the lynching issue, tried in 1902, unsuccessfully, but very publicly, to integrate the General Federation of Women’s Clubs; visited the South frequently and stunned whites in Memphis when she invited twelve leading clubwomen to a luncheon. Such a breach of Jim Crow in 1899 was reported and one White Memphis paper informed Addams: “She must be one thing or the other. If, on her next visit, she is given a less cordial reception, there will be no reason why she should be surprised.”

Yet Addams was unable to integrate Hull-House. Instead the work done by Hull-House among blacks, who by 1925 had settled in significant numbers near the Maxwell Street Market, was carried out through the medium of the Hull-House Community Club, an organization of women affiliated with the State and National Federation of Colored Woman’s Clubs. In Addams’s mind this arrangement must have resembled the setups Hull-House had developed with Greek and Italian women’s clubs. I caution us to not jump to conclusions about this stage of race relations in urban America but understand the “accommodation” that both sides engaged in.

When Charlotte Carr arrived in 1937 she immediately announced that Hull-House had to integrate. She sought out Dewey Jones and his family, got a Rosenwald Fund stipend to cover his salary, and announced that Jones was going to investigate the conditions of African Americans in the neighborhood of Hull-House. Jones was anything but an accommodationist and in his report to the Welfare Council of Chicago was blunt in his criticism of the Hull-House Community Club. Hull-House, he said, had not made it clear to blacks that they were welcome (admittedly HH had not said they weren’t, and that stance wasn’t good enough anymore. I am reminded of the statement Eugene Kinckle Jones, advisor on Negro affairs to the United States Department of Commerce, made to a gathering of social workers at the time of Jane Addams’s death: “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.

‘In her advocacy of a living wage and the shortening of hours of the toilers of the land, she not only knew that the protection of the interests of white workers demanded that Negro workers be removed from the role of competitors and scabs against white workers, but for their own well-being she demanded that justice be meted out to this group.”[2]

Charlotte Carr, then, was a known quantity to the personnel committee of the Hull-House Association’s Board of Trustees. Even Louise Bowen understood that the social, economic, and racial issues of the late 1930s required an experienced executive to head Hull-House. Bowen was so influential in financial and policy matters after the death of Addams, it is hard to imagine that anyone could have been hired for the position of Head Resident without Bowen’s approval; Charlotte Carr visited with Bowen at her summer home in Maine on several occasions. Then the deal was made. It was a deal that reflected the pressures that Bowen, as president of the Hull-House Association, was feeling from the Welfare Council and the National Federation of Settlements. Everyone told her that she must have a full-time, paid Head Resident. Adena Miller Rich, who had served as Interim Head Resident, had refused to take a salary, and had insisted on continuing with her directorship of the Immigrants’ Protective League. Such an arrangement was no longer possible: professional standards were taking over and not even Hull-House, the place where all of this had been invented, could ignore the new canon.

Openly advocating New Deal-style cultural expression and workers’ education, as well as civil rights, Carr shifted gears at the settlement. Dewey R. Jones, a journalist, who had been an advisor to Harold Ickes in Washington, D.C., was a good choice as the first African American resident at the House. Jones; his wife, Faith Jefferson Jones, a social worker; and their toddler, Dewey R. Jones, Jr., moved into the settlement in 1938. Harold Ickes, a Chicagoan with close ties to Hull-House and Jane Addams, had served as president of the local chapter of the NAACP. The Left-leaning New Deal networks had begun to include the black bourgeoisie; Hull-House was one of the connecting links in this new infrastructure, bringing blacks and whites together.

During Carr’s years, additional WPA workers joined staff and residents. Jesse Ogden and Jean Carter—specialists in workers’ education and people’s theatre productions—coordinated a theatre production, “Halsted Street,” that engaged residents and neighbors in a free-wheeling and politically engaged process that paralleled the spirit and politics of the Hull-House Magazine. Conceived and driven largely by the cohort of William Schenk, Alexander Saxton, and Willard Motley, Hull-House Magazine arrived on the scene in 1939—well after the advent of more widely known little magazines such as Anvil and New Masses—and lasted for only three issues. Regardless of its short production, it was an important break with the past. All cultural production representing the Hull-House—bulletins, yearbooks, invitations, even scenery and costumes for plays—was designed. Of course children and adults produced ceramics and other crafts in great profusion and these had the imprint of their individuality. But the stage performances, musical programs, and yearbooks and bulletins were done under the guidance and supervision of the staff and residents. Edith de Nancrede, beloved drama teacher, was a stern disciplinarian. One of her former drama students remembered: “I think casting was pretty much a unilateral decision that Edith de Nancrede made based on her knowledge of various people and where they fit into the parts of a play. There was no democratic aspect whatsoever.”[3] “She made the decisions on casting and I would say also pretty much on the selection of plays.” Miss Nancrede suggested [the name of our club] and then we voted on it. And we liked it so much. I think she probably suggested every name of every club, because she was that talented that she knew just—her suggestions were always met unanimously. Everybody enjoyed what she offered, you know. She said, ‘Do you think we should do this?’ and then we’d vote on it. * * * * * Everybody voted that way [yes]. No one voted against it.”[4] Nesta Smith, who taught string instruments at Hull-House let slip that “these new groups [Mexicans, blacks] that came in were culturally of a much lower level to work with. You see, they didn’t come with the kind of culture back of them that the Italians and the Jewish people and the Greeks did. Besides the blacks that we got mostly were the southern blacks that migrated . . . and, morally and culturally and everything, they didn’t have back of them what these other groups did. So it was quite a turn over . [when]. most of our old reliable European families were moving out.” [5]

Integrating Hull-House was possible during Carr’s tenure because Communists like Harvey and Jessie Lloyd O’Connor, and Alexander Saxton, brought a new spirit to Hull-House. They didn’t displace the Old Guard—dedicated, but limited, women like Nesta Smith, but for a very crucial, catalytic moment, the Cultural Front provided the courage and the context for a new politics and an enthusiasm for integration: Cultural Front artists and writers identified as cultural workers; and as white radicals, they wanted to be part of the creative explosion of the Chicago Black Renaissance that was bubbling up all over the South Side and, in some few sites like Hull-House where the Race barriers were being torn down. You could see the change in the magazines and wood cuts and paintings that were being produced, and the integration not only of races, but of residents and neighbors who would now intermingle in a different social interaction from the more formal and deferential exchange that had existed for forty years. Addams and her generation had gone to the limits of their cultural and social experience in the act of settling. Addams, especially had worked to redefine the basic human relationships between the classes in society, desiring to socialize connections.

The process of cultural production changed radically after 1937 – there was a freedom of expression, a spontaneity, a level of risk-taking; and the mimeographed newsletters that followed the Hull-House Magazines were filled with stories and tidbits about people and ideas, unrehearsed as if some spigot of creativity had been opened. Of course it was a different time period and these changes were part of deeper cultural transformations nationally. The Hull-House Block News, started by Dewey Jones, was an example of this new trend.

Carr found the whole concept of a Labor Museum, one of the legacies of the Addams’s years, archaic, and she wanted no part of it. The Labor Museum was one of those ideas that Jane Addams held onto. Conceived as a way to accomplish a variety of goals, it was a product of the arts and crafts movement and the progressive era fascination with exhibition and performance as a way to educate. These images of the work rooms that became the Labor Museum on the weekends, when neighbors would dress the part and perform traditional forms of weaving, spinning, rug-making, wood working, and so forth. On one level it was a device to give respect and status to adult immigrants whose children looked askance at the old world skills. It was also an opportunity for women and men in the neighborhood to earn money by making products that were sold in Hull-House shops located in downtown Chicago. And finally, the museum-quality objects that Hull-House borrowed from the Field Museum, along with charts and other educational materials, were used by lecturers to connect industrial workers with the history of the technology of craft. Addams held this theory that contextualizing present-day work would somehow help men and women deal with the repetition and dullness of the daily grind. She remained very proud of the Labor Museum. Carr was horrified. Donna Hodgman, a resident during the Carr years, left an unpublished memoir that describes the tensions between the received authority of Jane Addams via the Old Guard, and the urgency with which Carr worked to smash those things, like the Labor Museum, that made absolutely no sense to her. Instead she instituted Workers’ Education, a form of targeted, consciousness-raising adult learning that gave workers the information they needed in order to fight for their rights. One of the first projects was the publication of a digest of labor laws. Carr wanted to clear out the weaving room and make a meeting place for unemployed men, where they could get advice, perhaps even learn new skills. She wanted to retool the industrial shops and update what was taught. And, she was positively disposed to unionization of the workers at Hull-House and soon after she arrived, she began talks with an A.F.L. union for the engineers and the Social Service Employees Union, a CIO affiliate, for the rest of the staff. Many of the Hull-House kitchen staff and waitresses were already unionized; but Carr had taken the idea of unionization in a new direction. Carr was forceful and proceeded with union negotiations, but she had begun to alarm Mrs. Bowen and other more cautious trustees.

At the same time that the Cultural Front artists, writers, and activists were settling in, the whole climate in the United States against radicals and Communists had turned even uglier, if that was possible, then the Red Scare days following World War I. Among the Left-leaning New Dealers were individuals, like Carr, who began to feel the squeeze from the Left and the Right. There is no time to go into the sectarian issues that choked the energies of the CIO and other Left-leaning organizations, or to compile the evidence for the mounting anti-red baiting that was cutting off debate in the United States. Here I want to indicate how much what happens to Carr at Hull-House comes out of the larger political situation in which the Roosevelt administration and the whole nation became embroiled in. Unfortunately we have no private correspondence written by Carr, or memos, or anything that might reveal her state of mind before she decided that the trustees had made a vote of “no-confidence” when they instructed her about how she would, in future, deal with budget decisions. Carr believed that she was fired from Hull-House because of her politics, and I don’t think she was mistaken. It wasn’t her politics in the ordinary use of the word, however. She did support candidates and take political positions, but so had Jane Addams, and everyone knew that, although Bowen in a very revealing newspaper interview downplayed Addams’s political activities. Bowen put it succinctly when she said “Miss Addams seldom appeared at gatherings outside of Hull House. Labor and other forces came to Hull House. Miss Carr goes out of Hull House. She goes to labor and other groups. She takes Hull House to the masses.”[6] Bowen, once again, was remembering a sanitized and safe version of Jane Addams, but she had pinpointed the change in attitude that New Dealers and labor leaders embraced. The unions were no longer coming to the table with hats in hand.

By placing Charlotte Carr’s tenure at the center of a narrative of decline or dissolution, it negatively frames the two innovations with which she is most associated: the literal desegregation of the Hull-House residence and all of its programs, and, secondly, the reimagining of Hull-House’s future as a kind of labor college. In similar ways, her institution of a much more aggressive agenda of consumer education, her cultivation of new relationships with labor unions, and her recruitment of other workers (Jess Ogden and Jean Carter, Mary Wing, Alice Treleaven, and many others, all of whom had connections to activist worker education projects) signaled her new and ambitious hopes for the social settlement. Instead of situating the Carr years in the shadow of a charismatic leader, we should be thinking about her leadership as part of a large-scale reorganization of American life that includes higher education reform, the emergence of mass media, new forms of labor organization, and civil rights agitation.

If Carr embraced the challenge of integration head-on, Russell Ballard’s tenure at Hull-House was really shaped by the Second Great Migration of African Americans from the South in the 1940s and 1950s. The First Great Migration of African Americans from the Southern United States impacted the neighborhood around Hull-House only peripherally. The Second Great Migration of the 1940s and 1950s, however, reconfigured the spatial, cultural, and political map of Chicago, creating a challenge for all the social settlements including Hull-House. This is the context for understanding the twenty-year tenure of Russell Ballard (1943-1963), who was, like Charlotte Carr, keenly interested in race relations in the United States, and committed to policies of integration and anti-discrimination. Demographic and economic changes coupled with slum clearance, highway building, and plans for urban renewal began to change the old neighborhood.

As early as 1940, trustee William Deknatel, a close ally of the settlement, was critical of Charlotte Carr’s emphasis on neighborhood initiatives in a fundraising letter she had drafted. “Hull-House, I feel needs a broader basis of appeal. Further, we must face the fact that the Hull-House neighborhood is solving its problem by disappearing.”[7]

The changing nature of social work also added to the challenge faced by the Hull-House Association as it asked itself about the nature of its present role and future identity. Under the two decades of leadership of Ballard, the first professionally trained social worker and first male to direct the settlement, the freewheeling and spontaneous quality of experimentation that had characterized Hull-House and its residents in prior eras diminished and retreated.

The loss of financial autonomy as Hull-House became one of many social agencies regulated by foundations and governmental bodies, the emergence of a culture of professionalism that challenged the older model of volunteer resident-activist, and the demise of Progressive-Era and the Cultural Front-New Deal reformist politics and the rise of Cold War liberalism were among the factors that led to its changing social status and presence. Ballard was a liberal and a civil rights advocate who lacked the personal standing and reputation of a Jane Addams. He also lacked the political network of progressivism and the ascendant women’s political culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that had been so important to Addams’s success.

Hull-House continued to be a significant site of cultural expression but increasingly was unable to function as a sanctuary for unpopular and marginal views.

The high artistic cultural expressions that had been the basis of the conversation between Hull-House residents and their neighbors had been dislodged during the period of the Cultural Front, only to re-emerge in the conservative aftermath of World War II and this time without the patina of uplift. Ballard and his staff utilized and rehearsed the rhetoric of democracy and brotherhood but found the racial tensions mounting in the neighborhood and the nation difficult to counter. Instead of innovative programs for African American migrants from the South, Hull-House invested in outreach to the numerically smaller group of Puerto Ricans who had moved into the neighborhood west of the settlement. Integration efforts were carefully controlled in the off-site summer camp run by the settlement in Waukegan, Illinois. The efforts to organize the neighborhood for progressive change undertaken by the cooperative councils during the Cultural Front days now were carried out by a professional staff, with foundation grants, under the supervision of the Hull-House Association. Without a powerful progressive political network engaged in municipal, state, and federal negotiations with which to coalesce, Ballard’s advocacy of integrated public housing projects, community-based and controlled urban renewal plans, and progressive labor legislation had little success.

The Hull-House trustees who were increasingly representative of a real-estate industry-led redevelopment of post-World War II metropolitan Chicago (reflecting the Richard J. Daley plan for urban rebirth) ultimately found that the role for Hull-House was to help federal, state, and municipal authorities demolish the neighborhood that had been the focus and the context of the settlement experience between 1889 and 1959. James C. Downs, Jr., who served as president of the Hull-House Association in 1959,1960, and 1961, the crucial years in which the fate of the neighborhood was decided, was a downtown realtor who had also made a name for himself as the head of Real Estate Research Corporation, the firm that had done the original site studies for the proposed Chicago-area campus of the University of Illinois. He began his association with Hull-House sometime in the mid-1950s. He had become one of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s closest advisors. The other trustees in 1960 included: the wives of realtors Jay Beidler Camp and Ferd Kramer. Kramer, who was involved in some capacity in almost every major redevelopment project in Chicago, served as president of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Commission and in 1941 with Holman Pettibone, and Newton Farr, helped guide Chicago’s early renewal efforts. Kramer managed Lake Meadows, a project funded by New York Life, and developed Prairie Shores. Trustees also included: two African Americans, Nathan A. Scott, an Episcopal priest and journalist Era Bell Thompson; former Hull-House residents (William Deknatel, Mrs. William F. Byron, Wayne McMillen); Mrs. Wm. McCormick Blair, Louise Bowen’s daughter; Adlai E. Stevenson, U.S. Senator and former Governor; Charles P. Schwartz, a lawyer and former advisor to Jane Addams; George Consoer, a partner in an engineering firm; Mrs. W. Press Hodgkins, a Lake Forest socialite and philanthropist; investment bankers John E. Blunt and Wallace Flower; Mrs. Alma Petersen, a close ally of Louise Bowen’s who had served as president of the HHA board when Mrs. Bowen retired; Thomas Beacom, a trust officer with First National Bank; Mrs. Theodore Askounes Ashford, a Greek immigrant active in Greek-American organizations. Russell Ballard had lobbied for fourteen years to get the trustees to accept qualified neighborhood people as trustees. Mrs. Ashford was one of his small victories in democratizing the power structure within the settlement association.[8]

Bernard E. Schaar, an industrialist, also served as a trustee. His wife, Sarah Schaar was a social worker with the United Jewish Federation and had worked with Addams.[9]

By the end of the 1950s, the Hull-House Trustees were reinventing the settlement by contemplating its removal from its historic site and its transformation into a social agency that served multiple constituencies in locations throughout the metropolitan area. The vision of settling as a bridge-building act undertaken to create cross-class and cross-ethnic and racial harmony and understanding had fallen away, replaced by strategies of delivering services in decentralized settings.

Recent scholarship on the 1940s and 1950s suggests that underneath the veneer of a consensus and conformist society, and in contradistinction from the Cold War liberalism that was dominant, women’s organizations, peace and anti-nuclear proliferation groups, and groups working for better race relations gained ground. In its last years at Halsted and Polk, the Hull-House settlement dealt with race relations on a daily basis. It was a site where pro-integrationists and civil rights advocates who were connected at the federal and local levels kept a vision of a multi-racial and multicultural democracy as a goal to be achieved. The narrative of Hull-House and race in the 1940s and 1950s has been submerged. The recovery of the names of Robert C. Weaver, Robert R. Taylor, Dewey Jones, and Lillian Summers, a social worker who “replaced” Dewey Jones, whose untimely death in 1939 shortened his stay at Hull-House, are the main actors of this new narrative. Thomas H. Wright, who may also have been African American, lived at Hull-House in late 1940s early 1950s; he was the executive director of the mayor’s commission on human rights from 1945 and he died June 18, 1952. He was a teacher, a minister, and a federal official before heading the human relations group, and he was a columnist for the Chicago Defender. [10] Elaine Switzer, a social worker and head of the minorities committee of the Welfare Council, was Russell Ballard’s assistant in charge of race relations among the Italians and African Americans who came in groups to activities at Hull-House, at carefully calculated different times of the day (and night). It remains to be researched how their presence at Hull-House related to national policies and politics and neighborhood affairs. The other dimension of this period that cannot be overlooked is the spectre of red-baiting that reaches a high point with Joseph McCarthy. All the civil rights work undertaken by social settlements and other sites of efforts to establish multi-racial and multi-ethnic democracy occurred in the context of accusations and threats:

As Alex Gourse has written, for the Urban Experience website: “The tension between anti-Communism and liberalism that climaxed during the early 1950s with Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee was not new to institutions like Hull-House. Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton, Edith Abbott, and Charlotte Carr, among other Hull-House personalities, had all been singled out for their political views and activities. The Cold War brought the specter of radical subversion back to the center of American political culture, and avowedly “liberal” public figures like Russell Ballard were often branded as Communist sympathizers. As Ballard struggled to define the settlement’s role in a rapidly changing political landscape, his involvement with certain reform issues and groups drew criticism not only from outside the Hull-House organization, but also from within.” Ballard agreed with the position of organizations like Americans for Democratic Action — he was committed to social change and democracy, but definitely anti-communist, and not only because Joe McCarthy was out there. As with many Left-leaning New Dealers like Charlotte Carr, Ballard had been burned by the manipulations of Communist Party operatives who he felt tried to use Hull-House’s good name. There were many others who fell into the same category as Ballard. But it was a hard row to hoe when requests from internationalists and women’s organizations, including the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, were unwilling to purge themselves of subversive elements. In this climate, and with these constraints both self and externally imposed, Russell Ballard’s leadership style appeared muted in comparison to Carr.

A last thought — initially I found the juxtaposition of the real estate interests on the board of trustees and the self-consciously integrationist positions of Russell Ballard to be inexplicable. Why didn’t they fire him? What was going on? After unearthing the names of key civil rights leaders who were resident or trustee at Hull-House in the late 1930s thru 1950s, at the same time that James C. Downs and other real estate redevelopment/urban renewal promoters also served on the board, it hit me that this was, in fact, one of the “accomplishments” of cold war liberalism as practiced by Ballard at Hull-House. The essence of this liberalism was its accommodation to the private market; the integrationists had nowhere to go but in the direction of men like Downs and Kramer. These men, who would be awarded human relations commendations from the Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights do not look very much like civil rights leaders to me; yet the other side of the private market, the real estate block-busters and red-lining mortgage agents, were betting on racism to win out. At Hull-House the good realtors, the race relations specialists, and the liberals who believed in an interracial society and democratically-based local planning inhabited public space in an often polarized, violent urban landscape.

[1]“Friends Give Farewell Fete for New Hull House Head.” Chicago Defender, Oct. 2, 1937, pg. 7.)

[2] (“E.K. Jones Pays Tribute to Hull House Founder.” Chicago Defender, June 29, 1935, pg. 3.)

[3] (Alex Elson Oral Interview transcript, OH-074 [interviewed by Stuart J. Hecht] October 12, 1980, 16.)

[4](Eleanor Carroll Farwell Oral History transcript, OH-052 [Interviewed by Mary Ann Johnson] July 14, 1981,51-53.)

[5] (Nesta Smith Oral Interview transcript, OH-019 [interviewed by Babette E. Munson], January 19, 1982, 10.)

[6] “Jane Addams Spirit in Carr Background.” American, December 26, 1942, Folder 543, Hull House Collection.

[7] Deknatel to Carr, March 2, 1940, Folder 37, Hull House Collection.

[8] Ballard to Mrs. Byron, HH Trustee, Feb. 7, 1946, Hull-House Association 1936-55, Folder 2, Box 330, Welfare Council Papers, CHS.

[9] RWBallard, “The Hull House Experience.” Typescript Ms., 3-4. March 4, 1978 Un edited. RWB Folder 26, Box 3, Supplement V.

[10] T.H.Wright Dies; Aid to Mayor On Race Relations.” Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1952, pg.B9.

March 3, 2007July 21, 2026

Break The Box: Redefining Urban Space: Jane Addams and The Experiment at Hull-House, 1889-1915.

This post was written by Dr. Rima Lunin Schultz on March 3, 2007.

After seven years of searching for a way to live her life constructively, democratically, and autonomously, at age twenty-nine Jane Addams broke out of the traditional domestic box that society had constructed for women of her wealth and status. “I have been looking up different ‘slums,’” Jane Addams wrote to her sister before she and Ellen Gates Starr selected the dilapidated old homestead on Halsted Street that had once been owned by Charles J. Hull, a real estate developer, as the site for a social settlement they planned to establish. In 1889 Chicago was a city of contradictions and class conflict. Hull’s house was situated in one of the worst slums in Chicago. There Addams and co-founder Ellen Gates Starr opened the first social settlement in Chicago with high hopes of developing lines of communication and activity with people from different class, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. This was 1889.Twenty years later, the Hull-House settlement had grown into a world- renowned establishment of thirteen buildings, and Jane Addams had become an international figure known for her advocacy of social justice and peace. Ellen Gates Starr was recognized for her passionate support of striking women workers in the garment trades and was cited by Sydney Hillman as a great friend of labor. She was a leading figure in the Socialist Party in Chicago.

The two women had no reputation or political power when they first came to Chicago –Starr had worked as a schoolteacher in a preparatory school where Chicago’s wealthiest young ladies attended – and Jane was the daughter of a state senator who had known Abraham Lincoln—Ellen had no money, coming from an educated but not very prosperous family; Jane Addams had her inheritance (and between 1889 and 1895 she had spent it all with the Hull-House work). What is remarkable about them is that they were able, in a short amount of time, to become public figures in a growing reform movement with worldwide connections.

Addams–more than any other woman in the United States–engaged with both the male and female political cultures as a theoretician of democracy and as a political activist. Hers was an authoritative voice at the intersection of the great social movements for social justice, peace, and women’s rights long before women could vote in the United States. Such intellectual heavy weights as John Dewey, Richard T. Ely, William James, Henry Demarest Lloyd, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Dean Howells considered her books worth reading, and her ideas valuable. At the high tide of the progressive movement Addams wielded influence and, yes, power. Progressive politicians wanted to use her name, as did Social Gospel ministers.

What I want to set before you today is an account of what I believe gave Addams the power to become this great public intellectual: in the theme of this lecture series, I suggest that it was her ability to “break the box” of conventional female roles –the domestic box— and to turn women’s traditional care-giving role into an argument for the expansion of government as the protector of women and children and the regulator of social and economic conflicts in industrial society. In short, her greatest contribution was to be a leading voice in the development of the modern welfare state.

Addams became an international figure because of her writings; these, she insisted, were based on a new kind of sociological knowledge. Addams, argued that she could learn about what the neighbors’ reality consisted of through lived experience and she claimed her work was scientific: she and other residents offered their studies “not as exhaustive treatises, but as recorded observations which may possibly be of value, because they are immediate, and the result of long acquaintance.” Addams makes it clear that the authority for her political activism comes from having lived in the neighborhood not as a theoretician or scholar but as an activist engaged in constructive work. This manner of knowing the neighborhood is valorized by Addams and is the hallmark of the sociological investigation undertaken by settlement houses independently of universities or government agencies.

Thus Addams creates a new role for herself (and for other activist women) without being a professor at a university, a government official, an elected politician, or a captain of industry: she breaks the box by situating the production of social science knowledge in the neighborhood — a think tank on Halsted street, and authorizes herself and her associates as experts who should be listened to precisely because of her location within the “belly of the beast” — the labor and political crises of the late nineteenth century. She does this by establishing this new institution, which she insists is not an agency or a society, but simply a household of educated women who want to be good neighbors. In creating this new urban space, she allows the actors of the urban drama—workers, anarchists, immigrants, upper-class reformers, artists, children—to perform their roles.

Re-Defining Class and Gender Relationships

In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, co-founders of the Hull-House settlement, approached “settling” in the spirit of experimentation. Starr and Addams were urban pioneers and as idealists, hoped that they could do something meaningful to help adjust the serious imbalances that they knew existed between rich and poor in urban areas. They had grown up in the aftermath of the American Civil War and were shocked by the excesses of Gilded Age corruption in politics and business; they were disturbed by the hypocrisy of organized religion, the disregard of people who called themselves Christians but were not offended by the poverty that workers and their families endured even though hours were long. They were disturbed to see the increase in child labor and the neighborhood in which Hull-House was situated happened to be the largest sweat-shop district in Chicago. As college-educated women they were unwilling to ignore their own talents and accept a limited, private role within the family; they wanted to engage in the “real world” and learn about life from life itself. In order to do this, they had to break the box of traditional middle-class behavior, ignore the vast literature that argued women belonged in subordinate roles in society; they were aware of the terrible contradiction of middle-class values in a society where working class mothers could not afford to care for their babies, where children as young as five or six were doing piece work along with their mothers and fathers in tenement sweatshops.

Using the trappings of domesticity — Addams and Starr set up “housekeeping” in the old Hull homestead just like any married women might have done with their first home. They invited in their “neighbors” for tea and conversation; they visited their neighbors and helped with illnesses, brought food and clothing, and slowly began to learn about the true facts of life in the industrial slum that was expanding on the Near West Side. To their neighbors, who couldn’t quite figure them out to begin with, they seemed somewhat like nuns, but not exactly—and certainly people you could come to with a problem; to the wealthy clubwomen and liberal businessmen who had a vague sense of wanting reform, they appeared more and more as authorities who could explain what was happening in working-class neighborhoods. And as the Hull-House residents became more informed about the needs of the community around them, they began to experiment with new enterprises such as day care, baths, a place for reading, classes for learning English, a room where a neighborhood political organization could hold a debate, and before long, the space around the original house began to fill up with new structures to address the needs of the community.

The physical development of the Hull-House complex—beginning with the interior transformation of the original Charles Hull residence in 1889—and ending when the last or thirteenth structure of the complex was completed in 1907, is a dramatic metaphor for the social experiment in which they and other women and men residents engaged. In the context of Victorian society, they had to overcome conventional boundaries and remake the traditional sphere defined for women’s and men’s activities. Women had to expand their nurturing values beyond the home and into the public sphere: the settlement house took domestic space and turned it into a social center where public policy would be debated and political organization and citizenship would be encouraged. The male residents at Hull-House were able to express cultural and social values and to engage in politics outside of the dominant political machines and the competitive market system.

Key to Addams’s vision of the social settlement was her theory of the subjective necessity of the project in which she and Ellen Gates Starr embarked. In her now-famous essay, “The Subjective Necessity of the Social Settlement” and in other essays, Addams identified her central concern to encourage women and men of her class and education to engage in relationships with city dwellers vastly different in background and social conditions from them. Some might say that for Addams the needs of privileged and educated Americans to know first-hand the social conditions of immigrants and workers in crowded urban neighborhoods was more crucial than any assistance these primarily college-educated men and women could provide to the “disadvantaged” or “the newcomers.”

Addams argued that political democracy was only the first stage in the development of a democratic society. Civic life had to be developed and knowledge of the needs of the working class and immigrants could not be acquired without personal experience. Residency was crucial in Addams’s concept of social democracy, that is, her expanded understanding of democracy that was a way of living, a process, not just a system of voting. Therefore from its inception a major goal of Hull-House was to attract the right kind of residents. The most striking “qualification” of a potential resident was her or his ability to donate time to Hull-House and to pay for room and board. The assumption was that residents would have another source of income—a “day job” so to speak—and would volunteer at Hull-House. Out of the daily experiences, residents acquired an authoritative voice: Addams and the Hull-House residents became interpreters of working class and immigrant life; they began to write about the neighborhood, study it through surveys and, innovatively, they actually “mapped” the wages and nationalities of the immigrant quarter directly to the east of the settlement house. Such studies were used to lobby for new laws and regulations to humanize the industrial system and protect women and children from the worst abuses of the factory system.

Constructing Space for Same Sex Partnerships and Family Life for Social Activists

At Hull-House Addams was able to reject heterosexual marriage and find love and support through a same sex relationship with Mary Rozet Smith. To live as they pleased, creating their own relationships away from kinship ties was extraordinarily difficult in the Victorian era. The settlement house offered a solution to the marriage problem by allowing residents to make their own choices about personal relationships in the safety of community life. In her own life Jane Addams craved acceptance and affirmation of her choice to “settle” rather than marry. Left motherless at the age of two, Jane Addams’s father remarried Anna Haldeman when Jane was eight years old. Jane Addams’s concern, love, and acceptance of responsibility for her siblings, including her stepbrothers, and for her nieces and nephews went deep and lasted until her own death, but these sentiments and feelings of responsibility did not keep her from escaping the grasp of the family claim. Her negotiation of the family claim remained an on-going tribulation as she both mediated the negative aspects of her own family’s ambivalence about her life choices and increasing fame, and at the same time, “adopted” the complicated network of extended family relations of Mary Rozet Smith, the woman who became her life partner. For some, the social settlement became a surrogate family;[ Slides 55-66] [offered an oasis of calm for neighbors & residents, Slides 67-69] for married couples interested in forging a lifetime of social activism, the settlement house provided childcare, communal meals, and a release from the day-to-day chores and responsibilities that plagued women who generally have had the major burden of family living.

The Construction of Cultural Space

By 1910 there were about 400 settlement houses in the United States (Allen Davis, Spearheads For Reform [1967], p. 12). Of these, many were purposefully designed by architects, allied with reformers, who shared a philosophy about the significance of architecture and arts and crafts in the lives of urban inhabitants. In the process of constructing settlements, they also designed bathhouses, gymnasiums, recreation buildings and field houses they were creating a new kind of urban space in working-class neighborhoods. They were pioneers in the use of adaptive space, and in the construction of cultural space. The Butler Art Gallery building, designed by the firm of Allen B. and Irving K. Pond, was one of the earliest examples of a museum located in a neighborhood where immigrants lived in contrast to the typical central-city location generally reserved for museums and libraries. The Butler Art Gallery and the other buildings that followed were an expression of the Hull-House settlement’s development of a new kind of social space by providing a built environment for interactions among neighbors and residents of different generations, and from a variety of ethnic, class, and religious backgrounds.

Jane Addams met architect Allen Pond just before she selected the old Charles J. Hull mansion as the site of her settlement. Pond, already interested in ways to ameliorate the adverse social conditions resulting from industrialization, was attracted to both the arts and crafts movement and the awakening of a multitude of literary and artistic enterprises in Chicago. He was a member of the Little Room group, as was his brother, Irving K. Pond, partner in their architecture firm, Pond & Pond.

Gendered Philanthropy and Social Space

Jane Addams began Hull-House with money from her own inheritance. From the start, however, she accepted that one of her roles was to fundraise. Seven months before they opened the doors of the Hull mansion to their neighbors, Ellen Starr wrote her sister Mary that they were not obliged to ask for money to begin their undertaking, but once “the thing is . . . under way” they would approach individuals. Starr was excited to report that Dr. Gunsaulus, a prominent Protestant minister, knew “one very wealthy girl, heiress to millions” that they could contact. (Starr to Mary Houghton Starr Blaisdell, February 23, 1889.) Volunteerism was another way in which privileged women indirectly financed Hull-House. The college educated women and men who arrived at Hull-House eager to participate as residents were required to volunteer their services and to pay for room and board. The assumption was that residents either had independent wealth or held professional jobs separate from their endeavors at the settlement.

There were also many volunteers at Hull-House. The volunteers and residents were overwhelmingly women. Characteristic of female philanthropists who supported Hull-House was that they combined a hands-on volunteer participation in the settlement with generous personal financial contributions. This was the hallmark of Louise deKoven Bowen and Mary Rozet Smith. On the other hand, businesswoman Helen Culver developed her own philanthropy style, more akin to a businessman’s approach. While there were male philanthropists who gave money to Hull-House, the key women donors–Bowen, Smith and Culver–provided the preponderance of funding. Two men who gave extensively to Hull-House–Charles Mather Smith and Joseph T. Bowen–were the father and husband respectively of Mary Rozet Smith and Louise deKoven Bowen. In addition, Louise Bowen and Addams engaged in fundraising campaigns for Hull-House. They used their social and political connections including the sizeable women’s reform infrastructure to secure funding through private donations. Bowen and Addams preferred private funding and were reluctant to accept contributions from foundations or charities or from government sources

Constructing Social Space

Before long Hull-House had a full schedule of clubs, lectures, associations, classes and activities. Residents and volunteers led groups. The concept of social space was tied to the original idea of establishing a comfortable, safe and aesthetically inspiring environment in which educated and privileged women and men would develop reciprocal relationships with neighborhood people. Jane Addams envisoned the clubs as opportunities for such exchanges and was more concerned about the quality and spirit of socializing than in the skills or information being disseminated, the training being offered, or the games or dramas in which children and adults engaged. There were exceptions, however; music lessons were given to children whose potential was evidenced. Youth with promise were encouraged to take courses at the University of Chicago, for example, and given scholarships. The multitude of drama clubs supervised by Edith de Nancrede are the best example of how the settlement or socializing spirit trumped any elitist model. Often young children began their drama experiences doing children’s plays and continued to be part of the drama club system into their young adult years.

Constructing Space for Multi-Cultural Expression

The choice to co-found the Hull-House settlement at Halsted and Polk streets was made in large part because the neighborhood was becoming increasingly populated with the most recent immigrants to the United States, people from southern and eastern Europe. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr wanted to develop new avenues of social intercourse between middle class and wealthy Americans and the working poor who were largely immigrants and the children of immigrants. Dismayed by what they perceived to be the isolation of immigrants from any kinds of cultural and civic institutions, Addams and Starr hoped that by establishing a social settlement they could create a new kind of urban space. Initially, the parlors of Hull-House were transformed into this new space where educated and privileged young women and men who were residents or volunteers at Hull-House, would offer musicales, social evenings, reading clubs, and lectures to the immigrant neighbors. Problems of language and custom were in part mitigated by the settlement offering “ethnic” nights so that immigrants could partake of social life at Hull-House with their own country people.

Soon Hull-House was offering different groups in the neighborhood “space” to engage in ethnic theater, to join social, athletic, and political clubs that were composed of their country people, to take citizenship and English classes, to enroll their children in clubs and activities, or to take music or art lessons. Hull-House also offered community associations space to meet. There were clubs, classes, and activities that were multi-ethnic in composition. The settlement encouraged, but did not force, the mixing of races and nationalities during its first fifty years of existence. Instead, through its cultural and social activities, Hull-House attempted to model a new kind of citizenship and patriotism. It was based on the idea that immigrants brought to America the gifts of their traditional cultures and instead of seeing them as potentially dangerous to American institutions, Addams claimed that newcomers would become better Americans if they did not throw out the art and craft of their past experiences.

Constructing A New Citizenship For Women

Addams was a strong advocate for the organization of women into a system of clubs that promoted social reform. It was in this network of activist women’s clubs that Addams saw females attain their highest calling in the performance of duties beyond family responsibilities. Here in the “woman’s sphere” women assumed their social responsibilities, what Addams referred to as the “social claim.” It comes as no surprise that Addams and her colleagues in the settlement movement formed women’s clubs. The proliferation of local women’s clubs in late-nineteenth century America was part of the social transformation of the role of women in the workplace and in public life. Beginning in the 1870s, women in Chicago, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia formed clubs. Initially for literary and cultural studies, women’s self-education soon turned to public or civic affairs. The Chicago Women’s Club was established in 1876; by 1896, it had changed its name to the Chicago Woman’s Club, signifying its support of woman suffrage and its interest in an ambitious agenda of reform initiatives including a prohibition of child labor, anti-sweatshop legislation, and protective legislation for women workers. The club’s committees sponsored art in the public schools, school nurses, milk inspection and a juvenile court system. Jane Addams and other Hull-House residents were members of the Chicago Woman’s Club, the premier network of social activist women in Chicago and a model for the national movement of women’s clubs in the neighborhoods where their settlement houses were located in an effort to spread the structure and philosophy of organized womanhood. [Show slides 97 and 98] These slides make clear how much of the work of social settlements, not just Hull-House but others in American cities, reflected the divisions of race, ethnicity, religion, and class – even as there was an attempt to find ways to create a public square where interactions across these divides could happen — even at Hull-House, where radicals and nonconformists, homosexuals and artistic bohemians had freedom of expression, a de facto racism persisted.

Breaking Out of the Box — But Perhaps Constructing Another Box for Women

By turning domesticity on its head, so to speak, and redefining urban space through the construction of innovative institutions like the settlement house, women were empowered and gained an authoritative voice in the public square as an interest group. They did not, however, subdue the male dominated political culture that, in the last analysis, won the day. This final slide speaks volumes: Here Alderman John Powers — the bad boy of the neighborhood (and the most powerful of the alderman in Chicago during the first twenty years of Hull-House history) is shown throwing a brick at the settlement house. “He Won’t Be Reformed” is a familiar phrase in Chicago politics. Jane Addams and the political clubs at Hull-House challenged Powers in three successive elections — and they lost. We can discuss how much has stayed the same and how much of the vision that Addams and her colleagues shared has materialized — how much has urban America been redefined by the social reform vision first expressed by the urban visionaries of the social settlement movement.

July 27, 2005July 29, 2026

Progressive Era Feminism at Hull-House

This post was given by Rima Lunin Schultz as a lecture at the University of Chicago in 2005.

In my work with the biographies of Chicago women associated with the first wave of feminism, roughly from the 1870s thru the 1920s, it struck me that there was a relationship that needed to be defined between the larger woman’s movement in society and the rise of the new social science disciplines (political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology). There was also a related development of new practical schools for training in social work, public health, occupational and recreational therapy, and pedagogy. Women had a significant role in creating these institutions. In addition, social science research appeared not to be limited to academics at universities but was conducted by independent scholars, civil servants, and both male and female social reformers employed in new federal and state agencies, and private research institutes. This seemed to give women more authority in the new fields. Helene Silverberg writes that by the 1920s this opportunity for women began visibly to break apart. “The prestigious academic social sciences, under the firm control of their male practitioners, had fortified their boundaries through their commitment to a technocratic vision of social science modeled on the natural sciences. Women had achieved an enduring role in the other, lower-status forms of social science, housed elsewhere in the university as well as in federal and state agencies and private research institutes. But the range and scope of their participation even within this realm had been reduced and narrowed to such female-dominated fields as home economics, social work, and school-based guidance counseling” (Silverberg, editor, Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years, 3). This rise and fall of women’s innovation in the field of social science appears to coincide with the rise and fall of the first wave of feminism.

In examining Hull-House where alternative, gender-based social analysis flourished during the first wave of feminism, we may be able to identify those historical conditions in which women were leaders in establishing a research agenda that addressed their needs and aided in the implementation of programs designed to advance women’s causes.

The Hull-House social settlement was connected to the larger women’s movement and the women’s political culture; the settlement was controlled by women where the production of knowledge about gender and women was utilized to implement a woman’s reform agenda. Starting with the Hull-House maps and papers study, it functioned like a social policy think tank, a special-interest group (except its women’s agenda interests gave it a multifaceted orientation), and a social network of influential women whose overlapping memberships in other clubs and associations further strengthened the women’s movement in the city.

Julia Lathrop, for example, launched her career as a child advocate and social reformer out of her experiences as trustee of the Illinois State Charities Board. Here is where she obtained the data used in her article in Maps & Papers; and it was her connection to the infrastructure of charities, her first-hand knowledge of the institutional structures and their failures to deliver adequate services that gave her the context for her analysis and for her agenda to change the whole nature of public charity services, to depoliticize these systems, and to demand new education of personnel to run these public agencies. The powerful network of women’s organizations made the reform-minded Governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld aware of the need for change and it was his appointment of Lathrop that created the opportunity for the kind of exploration of these institutions and her subsequent leadership in the fight for reform of them.

A black-and-white photo of women in early 1900s clothing standing in a car draped with a banner reading Votes for Women, during a suffrage parade, with a crowd and building in the background. — Mrs. Charles Blancy, Mary Hawes Wilmarth, and Jane Addams en route tot he Progressive Convention, 1912 — Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago.

Fundamental to the woman’s agenda was the battle for suffrage; out of the Chicago Woman’s Club came the Chicago Political Equality League, a city-wide suffrage organization; this photo of Jane Addams with Mary J. Hawes Wilmarth in the 1912 suffrage parade illustrates the continuity that the struggle for suffrage gave to the first wave of feminism. Wilmarth had been one of the earliest members of the Chicago Woman’s Club in 1876; she was one of the first to embrace the cause of Hull-House when Jane Addams and Ellen Starr announced their plans for a settlement in 1889; Wilmarth was on the Hull-House board, and contributed funds. She with Jane Addams were on the platform of the Bull Moose party convention in Chicago in 1912 and as leaders of Progressive reform, endorsed Teddy Roosevelt’s third party candidacy.

Jane Addams and the Hull-House women were the “daughters” specifically or figuratively, of the first generation of organized womanhood, of women like Mary Wilmarth and Lucy Flower; while some like Addams personally fought the “family claim,” the women of her generation who sought careers and a different, more expanded relationship with public affairs were not necessarily in opposition to their mother’s generation. Addams and her generation, however, wanted to express their commitment to social justice and religious values in new ways; these new ways required carving out new institutions where women could legitimate their interests and lifestyles outside of traditional family arrangements. Addams and Starr wanted to make an impact on the industrial and political problems of their society; in the context of Victorian society, they had to overcome conventional boundaries and leave the traditional sphere defined for women’s activities. Among many other aspects of the Hull-House experience, historians including Kathryn Kish Sklar, Helen Horowitz, and Robyn Muncy have indicated how this settlement became this new space for women.

Addams and Starr were soon joined by Julia Lathrop, and Florence Kelley. After 1900, Edith Abbott, Alice Hamilton, Sophonisba Breckinridge and Grace became residents. Lathrop and Kelley were, like Addams and Starr, educated women without professional jobs or affiliations. Kelley had graduated from Cornell University but had to go to Europe to pursue graduate studies; Lathrop graduated from Vassar College, returned home, and informally read law in her father’s office. At Hull-House they functioned the way social policy specialists interested in gender and class issues might operate out of a university-affiliated institute, a government agency, or perhaps, a foundation or not-for-profit interest group. Hull-House provided the collective authority to do very innovative things. Abbott, Hamilton, and Breckinridge later brought the Hull-House point of view back to the university and, as a result of the historical conditions present there, were reasonably successful in creating “institutional space” for the production of research and scholarly books noteworthy for their focus on women’s issues. But they were forced to do so in separate women’s departments such as household economy (home economics) rather than in the economics and political science departments where they had been awarded doctorates. Yet much of what we know about women in the labor market, women’s legal disabilities as immigrants, comes from the work of Abbott and Breckinridge. Hamilton developed the field of occupational medicine and industrial toxicology, and was the first woman on the faculty of Harvard University. One could make the case, however, that it was Hull-House and its climate of research combined with social activism rather than the medical school community that was most influential in Hamilton’s understanding of the relationship of the environment to disease. While conducting research on antibodies and on scarlet fever and other diseases, at Hull-House she concentrated on public health efforts that allied her with progressive medical and proto-public health circles. In 1909 she studied 1600 working-class families and found that high infant mortality rates correlated with high birth rates. Hamilton worked in the initial phase of the Chicago Birth Control movement, led by gynecologist Rachel Yarros, also a Hull-House resident. These experiences provided the context for Hamilton’s growing awareness of the environmental causes of disease.

Breckinridge and Abbott received their advanced degrees at the University of Chicago; the former received the Ph.D. in political science in 1901 and the J.D. degree in 1904; the latter, completed her dissertation, “The Wages of Unskilled Labor in the United States, 1850-1900,” and received the Ph.D. with honors in 1905. Alice Hamilton studied science at the Fort Wayne College of Medicine and in 1893 received her M.D. from the University of Michigan. In 1897 Hamilton moved to Chicago to take up work as professor of pathology at the Woman’s Medical School of Northwestern University and residence at Hull-House.

Despite Breckinridge’s graduating summa cum laude in both political science and law, no academic position was offered to her, while male students went to positions on college or university faculties. Her opportunity for research and teaching came first through Hull-House where the new Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy (CSCP), an early social work school, (later the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago) was housed. It was funded in 1907 by an annual grant of $10,000 obtained from the Russell Sage Foundation. In 1908 it moved to larger quarters that adjoined the Immigrants Protective League office, another Hull-House spin-off, and had a connecting door. This arrangement facilitated interaction as well as collaborative research between the two agencies. Julia Lathrop, temporarily the director of research at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, asked Breckinridge in 1907 to take that position.

Edith Abbott accepted their offer to be the assistant director of research at the CSCP. In the early years of Abbott’s career, she too received support from social settlements in Boston and New York, and from the Carnegie Institute, a research foundation.

In these early years, Hamilton, Abbott and Breckinridge needed Hull-House. They would move back and forth between the settlement/women’s movement arena and the new places they were carving out for themselves and for scholarly work in the academy, but Hull-House remained a major influence. Hull-House was a place where women trade unionists, suffragists, and social reformers of many stripes advocated social activism on behalf of women’s protection, equality, and advancement.

Another way of looking at this is that universities did not have a monopoly on social science research in the 1890s and first two decades of the twentieth century. Hull-House, for example, was able to produce an extraordinarily successful work of scholarship in 1895 with the publication of the historic Hull-House Maps and Papers. Sklar has called the book a work of “female social science” since it was the product of the Hull-House women and reflected the new women’s agenda. In it the social feminist women of Hull-House began to define an agenda for social science as well as a plan of social activism that overlapped with women social activists in women’s civic organizations; but they were doing something new. They were staking out a new realm for the production of knowledge in society; twenty years later, the existence of this alternative place for the development of social policy initiatives would have influence on the shaping of academic departments and professional schools at the University of Chicago. They also implicitly established the value, indeed the necessity of a relationship between the realm of knowledge and of politics and practical activity. Five of the ten articles in Hull-House Maps and Papers focused on what might be called female-specific issues: sweatshop labor; Cook County charities; child labor; labor organizations for working women; a description of the work of Hull-House residents. The maps themselves were based on data collected by agents employed by the U.S. Department of Labor under the direction of Florence Kelley.

The fact that this work emanated from Hull-House gave it independence from the male-dominated departments at the University of Chicago and allowed for a focus on women and children. At the end of her career, Edith Abbott said, “Some of our social science friends are afraid that we cannot be scientific because we really care about what we are doing and we are even charged with being sentimental . . . This does not frighten me [either], for I know that a great physician also cares about the human beings he is taking care of and, like him, we can be kind without being sentimental” (quoted in Nancy Folbre, “The ‘Sphere of Women’ in Early-Twentieth-Century Economics,” Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years, edited by Helene Silverberg, 35). The Hull-House settlement believed, with Edith Abbott, that research was done to serve those in need and to heal social problems. The opposite, pure research removed from any social content would not have been valorized by Addams and the other residents who commented negatively about those who did not have “the settlement spirit” and worked individualistically, or for personal gain, or who construed a model of objectivity as the hallmark of knowledge, as if that were either possible or ethical.

Here was a place for women who remained marginalized in the university environment. But Hull-House was not the full extent of the connection university women maintained with organized womanhood and the woman’s movement. Women were better educated by the late nineteenth century, but they remained underemployed. The discrimination against women physicians, lawyers, and Ph.D.’s and their virtual exclusion from employment in male-controlled institutions meant that college graduates and professionals continued to participate in the agencies of organized womanhood such as the Chicago Woman’s Club, and to be involved in the politics of the woman’s movement. The Chicago Woman’s Club’s activist members ranged from birth control advocate and physician Rachelle Yarros to the first woman elected judge in Cook County, Mary Bartelme, was president of the Chicago Suffrage Club in 1907, nine years after her appointment as public guardian of Cook County. Julia Lathrop retained her membership in separate woman’s organizations before and after she was appointed the first director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau in 1912, and she was one of the founders of the League of Women Voters. Jane Addams and other prominent settlement leaders, were active; and university-attached women such as Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott retained memberships in the separate woman’s movement organizations long after they were professors at the University of Chicago.

Hull-House continued to support the research its women residents undertook; it also grew institutionally as an outcome of the implementation of social policy derived from the research. The Immigrants’ Protective League and the Juvenile Protective Association were special interest agencies designed to deliver services. They were also part of the system of investigation, policy formation and advocacy that characterized Hull-House enterprises. National legislation on immigration policy was influenced by the Immigrants’ Protective League and the Juvenile Protective Association spoke authoritatively on juvenile delinquency and its prevention.

Hull-House’s encouragement of research into new areas literally enlarged the physical campus; the first building in the the early years was adequate for readings in literature and the establishment of clubs, but soon the opening of a kindergarten, interest in art, theater, and music all required new space. The original Hull mansion was joined by a series of buildings that made up a complex of educational and philanthropic enterprises. When Addams and Starr moved in, they had occupied only the second floor of the old building and had the use of the drawing room on the first floor. By the spring they were able to lease the whole house; in 1891, they erected the Butler Art Gallery on adjacent property to the south. It was a two-story structure which housed a branch of the public library, an art gallery, and had space for clubs and classes. In 1892, the donation of dilapidated buildings in the immediate vicinity of Hull-House, made it possible to demolish the structures and construct the first public playground in Chicago, which was opened on May 1, 1892. In 1893 a second building was constructed with a coffee house below and a gymnasium above. A third story was added to the Butler Art Gallery building to provide rooms for men in residence in 1896; in 1898 a special building was erected for the Jane Club, the cooperative residence for working girls. A new coffeehouse, with a theater above it, was built in 1899 while the old coffeehouse and gymnasium were moved and remodeled. The next year the hull-House Labor Museum was established. In 1907, the dining hall which still stands, the last of the thirteen Hull-House buildings, opened. Included in this complex were the offices of the Immigrants Protective League and the Juvenile Protective Association; their “construction” illustrates more than the physical expansion of the settlement in the neighborhood for these “institutions” reflect the degree to which Hull-House initiated new areas of social enterprise, were part of a modernization and nation-building project that had national consequences. The Mary Crane Building was a concrete expression of the agenda of the maternalist welfare state: it housed health clinics fostering prevention; early childhood education facilities and teacher training, with mothers’ groups to socialize the migrant, the immigrant, and the poor into best practices of motherhood; its psychopathic institute pioneered research on abnormal behavior and juvenile delinquency; its play groups and music and art instruction tied the latest theories of the importance of the play instinct to child development.

An in-direct product of Hull-House activism and investigation is the published scholarship of its major residents. Abbott and Breckinridge’s collaborative efforts included The Delinquent Child and the Home (1912), which documented the problems faced by urban youth, and The Tenements of Chicago, 1908-1935 (1936), a study based upon house-to-house canvasing of 151 Chicago blocks with some of the research done by students of the two women.

Breckinridge’s first major book on women, New Homes for Old (1921), was a fascinating account of the difficulties facing immigrant women in American society. Family Welfare Work in a Metropolitan Community (1924) examined strains on the modern family, such as widowhood and illness, and Social Work and the Courts (1934) showed how law shapes the definition and resolution of social problems. These studies were part of the University of Chicago Social Service Series in which Abbott and Breckinridge selected materials to reveal the social construction of community issues. The first in this series was Abbott’s Immigration, Select Documents and Case Records (1924). Finally, Marriage and The Civic Rights of Women (1931), a classic statement in the sociology of law, discussed the relationship between marital status and citizenship.

Hull-House also made a lasting contribution to the University of Chicago: in 1920, when the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy completed its final grant from Russell Sage, (then phasing out its funding of social work training schools) Breckinridge and Abbott, who were convinced that a university was the proper place for a professional social work school, took the opportunity and negotiated to move their school to the University of Chicago. In 1924, the new School of Social Science Administration (SSA) became a permanent entity of the University of Chicago, with Edith Abbott appointed as dean.

In 1927, Abbott and Breckinridge initiated the social work profession’s first scholarly journal, Social Science Review, that published articles on social policy, social work research, and advances in social programs.

Other Hull-House contributions included Alice Hamilton’s work in the field of occupational diseases. Hamilton stayed on at the settlement for nearly four decades, becoming one of Addams’s closest colleagues. In 1908, Governor Charles S. Deneen appointed her to the Illinois Commission on Occupational Diseases; in March 1910 Hamilton became medical director of a nine-month survey, the first to combine modern laboratory investigation with field work. Her meticulous study of lead poisoning documented more than 70 industrial processes that used lead and 578 cases of lead poisoning, many of them severely disabling. The study prompted passage of a state occupational disease law in 1911, the year Hamilton became president of the Chicago Pathological Society.

Between 1890 and 1920, social feminists in Chicago accomplished a significant list of reforms to benefit women and children including the establishment of the juvenile court system, minimal protection for women in industrial jobs; the introduction of recreational and occupational therapy for inmates of institutions; they also produced some of the first works of research on gender topics. They had a permanent influence in the academy through the incorporation of the original School of Civics and Philanthropy into the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and through their insistence on the necessity of a research component for the study of social work. They did not, however, bring the study of gender and women into the core social science departments of the university or re-arrange any of the humanities curriculum; such an assault on the male-dominated disciplines of higher learning remained for Second Wave Feminists to confront.

Historian Nancy Folbre asks, “What would have happened if more women graduate students had found academic jobs, or if Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge had received academic appointments in political economy?” She answers, “It seems likely that research on women in general, and gender inequality in particular, would have proceeded further and faster than it did” (Folbre, 54). I am not certain I can agree with this conclusion. There is evidence to argue the other way. What would have happened to Alice Hamilton without Hull-House? Would she have been motivated to seek environmental or occupational reasons for diseases without the spirit of the settlement to guide her toward medicine with a social content?

August 3, 2004July 21, 2026

Art For the People, Art By the People: The Visual Arts at Hull-House, 1893-1945

This post was written by Rima Lunin Schultz and presented at the Teacher’s Workshop at the Terra Museum of Art, on August 3, 2004

Today I want to tell you something about the history of Hull-House and the role of the visual arts in its programs and philosophy. Before I do that, however, I need to talk briefly about the reform movement that gave birth to settlement houses all over the world, and to attempt a definition of what a settlement house is. It is easier to begin by establishing what a settlement house is not. It isn’t a charity organization, or a relief bureau, or an unemployment center, though at different times settlements provided direct relief and helped the unemployed. It isn’t a recreation center or a day care center, although settlement houses have sports and recreation programs and often have day care and nursery facilities. The settlement house, an approach to social reform with roots in religious, scientific and economic ideas in the mid-nineteenth century, was a method for serving the poor in urban areas by living among them and serving them directly. Settlement houses initially attempted to bring art and culture to the industrial districts of cities, areas where working class people struggled to survive as they dealt with the new factory system: low wages, long hours, cyclical unemployment and no insurance or healthcare. Child labor became a necessity for the majority of families. Women and children often worked in sweatshops or did piecework in their congested tenement apartments.

The early leaders of the settlement movement were motivated by a deep concern for the spiritual and emotional well-being of the working class as well as their material needs. How could human beings survive without art, without any beauty in their lives, without the opportunity for leisure? There was also a concern for the growing gap between the social conditions and experiences of the poor and working classes and the rising standards of living for the middle and privileged classes. The settlement movement adherents began to critique the traditional Christian charity organizations and the church establishment who held the poor personally responsible for their condition.

There was a growing sentiment among elements of the privileged classes that demanded a new understanding of the social and economic inequality of society. In religion reformers talked about a “social gospel” and began to reinterpret the Sermon on the Mount as a call to action to change society. The new field of social science called for the study of society in scientific terms. In the arts there were writers who questioned whether or not industrialism was really progress. They saw the new technology changing the traditional relationship of labor and craft or art and in the deskilling and dehumanizing work experienced by factory laborers, they believed that humanity was being alienated and denigrated. The consequences of having masses of industrial workers, dehumanized and severed from art and culture, the sources for civilization and moral values, was a frightening specter that haunted many of the thinkers of the age.

The educated young men and women who joined the settlement movement believed that they had to find the answers to the industrial and labor questions not in universities or in bookish pursuits, but experientially. They had to learn about life from life itself. Yet they also understood how key working class literacy was in developing the shared social goals for transforming the economic system along social justice lines. Sharing the life of the neighborhood was the key to the settlement houses’ developing vision. Dispensing art and culture was quickly supplemented by the task of meeting more obviously pressing needs: providing childcare, kindergartens, and classes for adults— homemaking, parenting, vocational training, and the English language for immigrants. Workers who saw children playing in streets and alleys every day began to campaign for city parks, and helped create the first public playgrounds.

But the path led deeper still—to the economic and political roots of certain social problems. Hull-House residents were astonished one Christmas when local children refused offered candy, till they learned the children worked long hours in a candy factory. Workers investigated living and factory conditions; they gathered statistics about child labor, housing, tuberculosis, and documented the circumstances that drove young women into prostitution. Jane Addams found herself riding with the garbage trucks, mapping their routes and keeping notes on their performance. (She eventually got herself elected garbage inspector for her ward.) Settlement workers aroused public opinion, teaching their neighbors to demand more from those running for political office.

What motivated Addams and Starr to live among the poor? Addams and Starr were college friends; both were born at the start of the American Civil War and came from families whose roots went back to New England. Their fathers had migrated to Illinois—John Huy Addams became a wealthy, influential civic leader, a state senator and friend of Abraham Lincoln. Caleb Starr never acquired wealth and as a farmer and small-town proprietor of a pharmacy, had participated in agrarian protest politics after the Civil War. Both men favored abolition, political rights for freed slaves, and education for women. Addams graduated from Rockford Female Seminary in 1881 and for the next eight years searched for a way to escape the domestic boundaries of upper-class Victorian family life; Starr, from an economically more modest but cultured family, only completed the first year at Rockford and, for financial reasons, took a job as a schoolteacher.

In 1888, the old school friends who had maintained an engrossing and complex relationship largely through letter writing, traveled to Europe together and, in the process of visiting cathedrals, museums, and finally, Toynbee Hall, a social settlement located in a London slum, began to imagine a life together as residents of a similar establishment in Chicago.

Coming out of rural, small town backgrounds, Addams and Starr were raised on ideals of democracy and Christianity; college educated, they had read widely in the humanities including the classics, the works of the romantics, and the critiques by men like John Ruskin and William Morris of the industrial age. They were dismayed by the excesses of Gilded Age materialism and political corruption, protested the conventional values that kept educated women dependent and subordinate to family claims, and had become aware of the deep social and economic inequalities that had emerged among the different classes in industrial cities. They had come to believe that traditional Christian charity was useless when it came to dealing with social injustice. They also had absorbed a Ruskinian sensibility of how labor and art were connected. You are familiar with the song “Bread and Roses” in which union girls demand not only sustenance for the body, but food for the soul. This, really, was the basis of all the efforts at Hull-House to support their neighbors; it meant that Hull-House residents worked in the arenas of politics and trade unionism in support of better material and working conditions at the same time that efforts had to be made to provide the opportunity for soul nourishment and this latter goal in a variety of ways, was expressed through activities with the arts.

Hull-House grew from its opening in 1889 in a shabby, but once elegant home in the heart of a working-class district, to, by 1907, a thirteen building complex. At Hull-House the visual arts took center stage from day one.

Addams wrote: “The attempt of Hull-House to make the aesthetic and artistic a vital influence in the lives of its neighbors, and a matter of permanent interest to them, inevitably took the form of a many-sided experiment” and that “the first furnishings of Hull-House were therefore pictures. They were hung upon all the wall spaces and were largely selected from photographs”[1] which Addams and co-founder Ellen Gates Starr had purchased in Europe the previous year. The first building erected for Hull-House, the Butler Art Gallery Building, Addams wrote, “contained a little art-exhibit room, carefully planned with a high, dark wainscoting and a north light, that fifty pictures might be exhibited to the best advantage.”[2] Opened in 1891, one and a half years after the settlement had been established, it had shown, by 1895, eight loan exhibits: five of oil paintings, one of old prints and engravings, one of water-colors, and another of photography.

The construction of the Butler building for the purpose of bringing great art to a working-class immigrant neighborhood was such an unusual event that the opening art show was reported in great detail in the Chicago press. Chicago writers called Hull-House the “Chicago Toynbee Hall”[3] indicating the link between the local experiment in settlement house work and the pioneering work of London’s Toynbee Hall settlement. American journalists knew that Addams and Starr were part of a larger social reform movement that was gaining adherents in industrial cities in Western Europe and the United States. They also realized that one of the central convictions of this new experiment in working with the poor was the idea that the arts had a crucial role in the lives of the “have nots” as well as the “haves” in society, that the privileged in society had an obligation to bring art to the masses. The list of wealthy Chicagoans who attended the opening of the Butler Gallery, and who had loaned works of art from their own collections for the exhibit, was a mirror image of Chicago’s leading art patrons and trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago.[4]

All of the interior spaces at Hull-House can be considered informal galleries. This was true of the public areas of the Hull-House complex in which activities and programs were open to the neighborhood and generally were free of charge, as was the Butler gallery.

It was also true of the areas where the Hull-House residents lived. These residents were women and men, mostly college educated, who came to Hull-House to live for from six months to several years or, in the case of Enella Benedict, the head of the Hull-House Art School, from 1892 until her death in 1942, a half century. They came not as social workers or teachers who received salaries, but as volunteers who paid room and board for the privilege of experiencing the settlement house community life. Often they held “day jobs” and were able to volunteer in evenings and on weekends, assisting in the social clubs and classes that proliferated. Benedict, for example, the daughter of wealthy Lake Forest, Illinois, merchant and civic leader Amzi Benedict, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in France. She shared with Addams and Starr their “vision of the interdependence of art and society and the role of the arts in improving the lives of the urban poor while renewing the dignity of labor.”[5] Benedict taught drawing, painting, and anatomy at the Art Institute of Chicago in the morning and then attended to her duties at Hull-House and, like the other residents, paid for her room and board and participated in many Hull-House activities besides the studio arts that she taught and supervised.

In the early years women artists and crafts persons including Benedict, Ellen Gates Starr, Alice Kellogg Tyler, and Norah Hamilton taught art at Hull-House at the same time that they were artists-in-residence. Their works included neighborhood scenes, portraits of each other and of neighbors. Domestic and public spaces were loosely defined in the Hull-House complex and the genre art produced there reflects this aspect of the social settlement. One of the outcomes of this interrelationship between the neighbors and the residents was an art that reflected the immigrant quality of the neighborhood

Here again Benedict serves as an interesting example. Her landscape paintings were in the style of the impressionists and the subject matter reflected scenes away from the urban life at Hull-House. Two paintings demonstrate the influence of the neighborhood. The first, the portrait of Edith, is an example of how the women artists painted what was familiar. Edith was a neighborhood girl yet she is painted in this instance in the style of impressionism and just as Benedict might paint her own niece. The second example is a pastel of men walking rather somberly along a city street. Although there is no date for this drawing, it clearly shows the influence of urbanism and the plight of the unemployed. Benedict, along with the other residents who lived at Hull-House during the economic depression of 1893 and 1894, and witnessed the unemployment lines in the neighborhood began to paint the poverty that she saw. .

From the earliest days artists and photographers became interested in Hull-House and its neighbors. By the time that Addams published Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes, in 1910, photographs by the famous social photographer Lewis Hine and by the illustrator, Norah Hamilton, a Hull-House resident, were graphic representations indelibly etched in the consciousness of countless Americans. In general, the images of immigrants produced by Hull-House residents were humanistic and constructive rather than derogatory and dehumanizing. Although they did not avoid all the pitfalls of immigrant stereotyping, in the context of the national debate on immigration policy that was characterized by a pseudo-scientific and erroneous racial theories, Hull-House treated immigrants as individuals deserving of respect and protection whose traditions should be preserved even as adaptation to new American conditions was encouraged. These images, of course, were also viewed by the immigrant neighbors themselves and were part of the visual experience of Hull-House.

One particular immigrant woman was depicted by artists and photographers at Hull-House. Her image by Lewis Hine was included in the serial version of Jane Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes in 1910. That was the same year that the book length Twenty Years appeared and in it the immigrant woman—I have called her a “neighborhood Madonna” appears in a drawing by Norah Hamilton. A photograph of the Hull-House art studio shows our “neighborhood Madonna” at rest, perhaps awaiting the moment when she will pose for an artist.

For Ellen Gates Starr, providing art within the buildings of the Hull-House complex was not enough. What about the child in the crowded and unadorned schoolroom in the neighborhood public school? Or the family that lived in a tenement flat that had no objects of beauty? Two programs emerged almost simultaneously: lending pictures to the poor and providing pictures for the public schools. Starr initiated these programs at Hull-House but realized that one settlement house could never meet the needs of a city like Chicago. The program of lending pictures to the poor spread to other settlement houses that had been established in other immigrant and working-class districts and were influenced by Hull-House. For example, a Chicago newspaper reported that “The success of the circulating picture gallery at Hull-House, Chicago, induced the promoters of the Friendly Aid House, which is under the guardianship of All Souls’ Unitarian Church, to introduce such a feature”[6] at its settlement.

Starr was concerned about the school children, especially those in cities like Chicago where the culture of the streets seemed to take away a child’s innocence just as the need for child labor sapped the young and turned them prematurely old. She wrote that the nourishment to life of one good picture to supplant in interest vicious story-papers and posters; of one good song to take the place of vulgar street jingles, cannot, I believe, be estimated or guessed. A good picture for every household seems unattainable until households can produce, or at least select, their own; but certainly a good one in every schoolroom would not be unattainable, if the public should come to regard it as a matter of moment that the rooms in which the children of the land spend their most impressionable days be made beautiful and suggestive, instead of barren and repellent.”[7] Starr was able to enlist the cooperation of a committee of women from the Chicago Woman’s Club, one of the key social reform organizations of women in the city, to form the Chicago Public School Art Society in 1894.

At Hull-House formal art education for children achieved a high priority, again because of the belief that children’s moral and spiritual development depended upon exposure to transcendent ideals, especially in a world so rooted in materialism and so lacking in places of beauty. The Hull-House Art School for children emerged from the original art studios in the Butler building. It moved from that location to the top floor of the Smith or Children’s Building in 1910; there after years of working by gas light, the artists were delighted to have natural lighting from above. Children proceeded in their art education along a systemic line of study and were exposed to a variety of media, starting in beginner classes for the very young to more advanced classes in technique and composition for older children. A pottery program in the art studio appealed to older children. Children were encouraged to sketch out of doors, whether the outside consisted of the neighborhood in the vicinity of Hull-House, or on the grounds of the Bowen Country Club, the summer camp in Waukegan, Illinois, operated by the Hull-House Association. As the pictures illustrate, the Hull-House complex created an environment where reading, sketching, designing a piece of pottery or painting on an easel were normal activities for working-class kids from the neighborhood.

Starr and Addams were interested in art for adults as well as children because they associated it with the development of a collective spirit in a people. Art had spiritual and civilizing power and therefore was crucial in the character formation of young people and in the resurgence of ethical behavior among adults whose labor in dehumanizing industrial jobs alienated and demoralized them. This worked two ways at Hull-House. On the one hand, the realities of industrial life forced an enlightened citizenry to meet the challenge by examining the conditions under which most immigrants lived and worked and, finding them wanting, make the appropriate changes. For the Hull-House residents, immigrants presented the United States with a challenge to live up to the ideals of democracy; the way to teach immigrants about democratic values was to work with them in political and labor alliances to reform American society and, in the process, strengthen democracy. There was also the challenge of providing opportunities for immigrants to engage in arts and crafts, to attend good theater and listen to great music, to have objects of beauty close at hand, and, for the children, to provide opportunities for education in the visual and performing arts. Hull-House became known for its music and art schools; children had to show potential talent or aptitude to take individual music classes and they also had to pay a fee for lessons, albeit a minimal one. There were always scholarships available. Indeed, children with talent were cultivated. Music and art teachers took students in small groups or individually to symphony hall or to the opera or a theatrical production downtown. Addams sought scholarships to private schools and the University of Chicago in cases where a young person from the neighborhood exhibited outstanding promise.

We now come to the final portion of my talk today. We turn to the concept of art by the people and examine its manifestation in the Labor Museum, conceived more by Jane Addams than by Ellen Starr, but out of a shared concern for the denigration of craft and the isolation of labor from art. The ideas that informed the Labor Museum were partly from the arts and crafts movement. But Addams ignored certain key aspects of the art and labor theories. For one thing, she never attempted to create an arts and crafts shop that was owned and managed cooperatively by the workers. I do not have time to talk about the Hull-House Kilns and the Mexican pottery production that was supervised by Myrtle and Beals French from 1927 to 1937, but there is much information about this aspect of art at Hull-House on the Urban Experience website—but my understanding of the structure of ownership and authority in terms of creation and distribution of the ceramics and pottery produced there, is that the work was done under very conventional lines, with the workers being subordinate both in terms of creativity and in outright ownership. The ideas of the arts and crafts movement, sans the communitarian or worker-controlled shops, informed many of the programs incorporated into the daily life of the settlement as well as the way in which the settlement evolved architecturally and decoratively. Addams had observed how the children of immigrants seemed to devalue the traditions and crafts of their parents’ homeland. Children did not like to see their parents wearing ethnic-looking clothing, for example. Addams also observed older women and men who never quite adjusted to American society. Often she found out that an individual who had had a talent for woodworking and had expressed himself through a folk art that had no purpose in America. The Labor Museum, which opened in 1900, was conceived to address these issues of displacement, intergenerational conflict, and deskilling.

[1] Jane Addams, “The Art-Work Done by Hull-House, Chicago,” Forum 19 July 1895, p. 614.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “A Local Toynbee Hall,” Chicago Inter-Ocean (April 24, 1892): 4.

[4] http://tigger.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/urbanexp/main.cgi?file=cultural.ptt&id=857 (link no longer works)

[5]Cheryl R. Ganz, “Enella Benedict,” in Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001): 75-6.

[6]“Pictures Lent to the Poor,” (unidentified March 1896 clipping) Hull-House Association Records, Scrapbook III, Folder 508, 71; JAMC, Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.

[7] Ellen Gates Starr, “Art and Labor,” Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895), 165-166.

September 19, 2003July 29, 2026

“Staging Halsted Street (1939): An Unusual Production in Hull-House’s Theatrical History.”

This post comes from a talk by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Performing the People, The People Performing: Theatre and Dance at Hull-House Conference, held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, September 19-20, 2003.

Before I launch into my formal talk, I would like to acknowledge the fine work of Ellen Skerrett, associate editor of the history website Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963. In the process of preparing the section of our website that deals with the Performing Arts at Hull-House, we were able to locate the script for the play, Halsted Street, perhaps the only copy that has survived; we also found a wonderful unpublished memoir of a Hull-House resident, Donna Hodgman. Her manuscript contains the fullest description of the events surrounding the production of Halsted Street. Ellen wondered if Donna Hodgman’s son, Christopher, nicknamed “Kit,” who lived with his mother and father in one of the residents’ apartments in the Boys’ Club Building at Hull-House, could be found. Ellen tracked him down and I am happy to announce that he is here today. Dr. Christopher Hodgman’s notes about his boyhood at Hull-House, Donna Hodgman’s manuscript, and the Halsted Street script are all on our website in the Historical Narrative section under the Performing Arts at Hull-House, along with many other texts and images. Sarah Hoadley, also an associate editor of the website, prepared electronic versions of the documents and has written the editorial notes. Dean Judith Kirshner of the College of Architecture and the Arts and Professor Margaret “Peg” Strobel, Interim Director of Hull-House Museum have been generous in their support of the website and this theater project.

My role today is to introduce an audience in 2003 to the late 1930s depression- milieu in which the unusual Hull-House theatre production, Halsted Street, was conceived and staged. Economic and social events following the 1929 Wall Street crash and the spreading unemployment that continued through the 1930s had changed the political and cultural landscape of the American nation. The Federal Theatre, part of the New Deal’s WPA, introduced millions of Americans to new forms—the Living Newspaper, agit-prop drama, the drama of social criticism. In Chicago race and class issues erupted and protest politics took shape. The National Negro Congress (NNC) had strong Chicago support; Theodore Ward’s play Big White Fog, a Chicago Federal Theatre production, created controversy with its critique of capitalism and portrayal of Garveyism and socialism as alternatives for the black masses.

At Hull-House, the oldest and the largest settlement house in the United States, internal changes combined with the larger social forces in society. The death of Jane Addams in 1935 had personal and institutional repercussions for the residents and staff. Yet newcomers continued to find their way through the front doors. Donna and Crosby Hodgman had come to Hull-House because they “kept reading about the depression in the New Republic” and thought that residency at Hull-House would connect them to the struggle.[1] The Hodgmans, with their nursery-age son, Kit, moved into one of the residents’ apartments in the Boys’ Building. During the day Crosby taught at the Chicago Latin School, an expensive private institution; Kit attended the nursery in the Mary Crane School in the Hull-House complex, and Donna taught citizenship classes and then became the “House Manager.” We learn about the staging of the play Halsted Street and about conditions at the famous settlement from 1936 to 1942, through the “eyes” of Donna Hodgman. Her status as a newcomer freed her from the worst sort of sentimental memorializing of Jane Addams and her critique of the dingy and worn out interior spaces and the breakdown of leadership among the remaining Hull-House standard bearers is confirmed in the Trustees’ Minutes of the Hull-House Association. Hull-House was in trouble in 1936.[2]

With the arrival of Charlotte Carr in 1937, the settlement once again reverberated with the vitality and enthusiasm of women and men with a cause. There were still serious administrative and budgetary problems, but there was an infusion of federal funds, WPA workers, and strong leadership. By 1938 there were ninety-eight residents at Hull-House; seventy-five were paid salaries, and there were between sixty and eighty volunteer workers.. [3]

The desegregation of Hull-House began in these years and coincided with the publication of Hull-House Magazine, edited by William Schenk, with associate editors Willard F. Motley and Alex Saxton. Motley did not reside at Hull-House but participated in the cultural life of the settlement, calling it his university; an African American writer steeped in the lore of the West Side neighborhood, he and Alex Saxton developed a friendship, one of the inter-racial friendships that became possible at this time in the New Deal milieu of Hull-House. Saxton, a Hull-House resident, said he first became aware of racism because of his engagement and belonging to the Communist Party. He read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road and learned black history from the CP branch in Chicago. Other residents at the time included Communists Harvey and Jessie O’Connor; Harvey was formerly editor of The People’s Press; Schenk collaborated with Jess Ogden on the Halsted Street script. [4] Alice Treleaven, who had been employed by the Adult Education Project of the W.P.A., teaching workers’ education at Chicago Commons, had left that position to work at Hull-House. Jerry Ingersoll, a Dartmouth College graduate developed classes in civics and labor problems. Leah Dickinson, an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers who had six years’ experience in settlements—Kinsley House in Pittsburgh, and Christadora and Union settlements in New York—was Charlotte Carr’s assistant. [5]

There are three observations I want to make about Hull-House in the late 1930s. The first one is that it was extremely difficult for old timers who remained after Addams’s death in 1935 to see anyone else in the leadership role at Hull-House, either as Head Resident or on the Board of Trustees. Even as they reminded themselves that Jane Addams would be the first to embrace change, they lived in their memories as they attempted to work in the present. Charlotte Carr’s five years were difficult ones since she made the trustees and older residents uncomfortable from the first moment she arrived. The trustees, who were more cautious than the residents, had to be persuaded to allow the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee to rent Bowen Hall for a meeting to discuss the policing of industrial disputes with a showing of the Paramount newsreel of the 1937 Memorial Day riot in South Chicago near the Republic Steel Plant. [6] They found it difficult to find “new blood” to invigorate the Hull-House Association board and continued to look for trustees who replicated their own class and social status.[7] This makes the staging of Halsted Street an unusual Hull-House production.

My second observation is that the Hull-House facilities were in terrible disrepair. The worst part about the physical deterioration of the place was the pressure it placed on the trustees to fund raise for maintenance and upkeep at a time of economic crisis. In 1929 at a conference of settlement leaders that included Graham Taylor of Chicago Commons, Mary E. McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement, and Addams, the three icons of the social settlement movement were asked what they would do differently if they had the chance. Addams replied that perhaps they had grown too large and were hampered by the physical space they inhabited: “There are too many roofs,” she noted, and the implication was that they all needed repairs.[8] Charlotte Carr had to deal with the repairs at the same time that she was trying to develop new programs. When federal programs ended in 1939, Carr and the board began to dip into unrestricted endowment funds to cover the annual deficit. When the trustees refused to accept her budget for 1943, Charlotte Carr resigned. [9] Carr and Ogden’s “freedom” to stage Halsted Street was directly related to the infusion of federal money to support the Workers’ Education Department staff at Hull-House.

My third observation is that even in this period of upheaval and change, the value of artistic expression in the lives of ordinary people continued to be one of the major goals of Hull-House and was embraced by oldtimers and newcomers alike. The production of Halsted Street in 1939 was an affirmation that art had a fundamental role in people’s lives.

The various federal arts programs during the New Deal had much in common with Hull-House’s legacy of “Art for the People.” One of the first activities at Hull-House had been the Shakespeare Club, conducted by Ellen Gates Starr, in which neighbors read plays. A raised space in the first floor parlor or drawing room became a “stage” for performances, followed in 1893 with the construction of theater space in the Gymnasium and Coffee House Building and, finally, in 1899 when the Hull-House Theatre was built.[10]

Theater at Hull-House always had social objectives and these were privileged above any “art for art’s sake” approach. As Stuart Hecht has detailed, Addams selected directors who shared her values and endorsed the inclusive participation of children, adolescents, and adults in social drama clubs. Only the Hull-House Players, directed by Laura Dainty Pelham from 1900 to 1924 and, after her death, by Maurice J. Cooney from 1924 to 1941, were exclusive in the selection of participants.

Edith de Nancrede’s work with the Hull-House Children’s Theatre and the multitude of social drama clubs she directed, was the purest expression of Jane Addams’s concept of the function of drama [11] After Nancrede’s death in 1936, Hull-House struggled to reconfigure its drama programs. Helen Tieken Geraghty, a student of Max Reinhardt, became director of the Actors’ Guild at Hull-House. She, too, saw the social and educational possibilities of theatre and proposed a Hull-House People’s Theatre in 1939 as an artistic and cultural expression of the various ethnic and racial groups in the neighborhoods near the social settlement. The proposed People’s Theatre, like the Hull-House Labor Museum, established by Jane Addams in 1900, would be a showcase for the different cultural traditions found in the neighborhood with the goal of developing mutual respect and understanding. Unfortunately, there was no money for such an initiative. [12]

It was in Jess Ogden that Charlotte Carr found the most able practitioner of the Hull-House theater spirit. He incorporated “the Mexicans, Negroes, Greeks, and Italians of the neighborhood” into the process and encouraged a collaborative spirit[13] but according to Donna Hodgman, Ogden was the creative force and the play, Halsted Street, was his creation. “I couldn’t make head or tail from the descriptions I heard,” she wrote. Ogden talked about using blackouts instead of a traditional curtain. The stage was to have several levels that she “couldn’t visualize . . . at all!” [14] There was going to be a model streetcar on stage that was going to contain the speaking chorus. An elevated historical panel was to be constructed “in which true stories of the past will be re-enacted.” [15] Advertised as an “animated mural” Halsted Street was billed as a play about “the concept democracy” that had as its main theme “the need for racial cooperation.” [16] Along with the model streetcar, skits and the elevated historical panel, the play also used poems by Carl Sandburg, selected by William Schenk from the poet’s Chicago Poems, from Slabs of the Sunburnt West, and From Smoke and Steel. Schenk’s note in the typescript reads: “In 1914, Carl Sandburg, the American poet, extended an invitation to the cartoonists of Chicago. This May [1939] Hull-House accepts. The poet said, “Come you cartoonists/Hang on a strap with me here/At seven o’clock in the morning/On a Halsted Street Car.[17]

Although we have recovered the file that contains the typescript for the play, including the chorus and at least one historical scene, the Sandburg poems, and a rough drawing of the stage set with some stage directions, we can only speculate just how Halsted Street was staged.[18]

The Halsted Street production evoked the themes and theatrical techniques of the experimental plays of the Federal Theatre Project. Prior to Carr’s arrival, Hull-House had had little if any contact with the Chicago branch of the Federal Theatre Project, although its Children’s Theatre group had won a National Youth Administration drama competition. [19]

Carr had no particular interest or knowledge of the performing arts. A Vassar graduate, she had served as a policewoman in New York City, patrolling the Brooklyn Bridge during World War I, as Secretary of Labor of Pennsylvania under a liberal and reform administration, and as a director of relief in the early years of the Great Depression in New York City under Mayor LaGuardia. She had never worked in a settlement house.[20] But she liked the idea that permeated the Federal Theatre Project and Workers’ Education in the 1930s: using theater for workers’ education and for social change.

In the five years that Carr was Hull-House’s director, Carr and her staff used drama and pageantry to resolve ethnic and racial conflicts and to encourage those groups in the neighborhood who remained marginalized from the settlement to enter its doors. One of the most important decisions Carr made was to invite journalist Dewey R. Jones and his wife Faith Jefferson Jones, a social worker, to become the first African American residents at Hull-House. They lived at Hull-House with their son, Dewey Jr., who was a toddler.

Carr asked Dewey to conduct a study of black needs at the settlement; he had been a special assistant on black issues to Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and had been involved with Ickes’ efforts to guarantee integrated public housing in Chicago.[21] Jones’ too short stay at Hull-House (he died in April 1939) was just long enough for him to leave one of the few documents we have that addresses the conditions of race relations in the neighborhood and at the settlement. What he found was that the neighborhood in 1938 included the largest Italian population in Chicago, the largest Mexican colony and the second largest black colony. Almost no inter-racial work had been done by Hull-House, a fact that Jones believed “was [not] because of any policy of the House or any decision on anyone’s part but just because of a sort of taking for granted that if an institution was in the heart of the community and had facilities, everyone who needed them would take advantage of them.” [22]

Jane Addams, Jones discovered, had established a Negro mothers’ club in 1927 that met at Hull-House but never became part of the general settlement community. “They were not on any mailing list. They had their meetings only. Their children came the same night, and when the Federal government began to assist in this type of program Hull House acquired some WPA and NYA workers and one of them was assigned the job of corralling the Negro children and keeping them busy.” [23] Hull-House was not alone in its de facto segregation: the American people from top to bottom experienced the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II as a segregated society.

Charlotte Carr’s decision to create two new departments at Hull-House—the Community Service Department and the Workers’ Education Department—along with her reorganization of the settlement’s administrative structure, opened the door to inter-racial activities. The first dealt with the relationships of neighbors and nationality groups to one another, to their environment, and to Hull-House. The second expanded the traditional courses in citizenship and English to include outright education in workers’ rights, union organization, and issues of management and labor.

There were visible cultural expressions that I believe were the outcomes of her new approach. In 1938, the four major groups—Italian, Greek Mexican and black—cooperated together for the first time to present the Christmas tableaux, an annual event at Hull-House that had been, since its inception in the early years of the settlement, an expression of a universalized Christian symbolism. The 1938 version incorporated the “Italian conception of the birth of Christ; the Blessing of Christ in the church according to Greek tradition; ‘Pasada,’ the entrance into Bethlehem, according to Mexican conception; and the Adoration of the Magi from the black point of view. The play was accompanied by songs rendered by the group whose tableaux was on view at the time.” [24] This direct identification of the pluralism that existed even in the context of a collective celebration of Christmas was new for Hull-House. Differences in religious expression had been subsumed within the high culture of European or Western Christian art—the kind of images visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago could see; the music played at Christmas time at Hull-House was the kind performed by the Symphony Orchestra and in the Protestant and Americanized Catholic churches that still resisted the ethnic or regional customs and popular art of marginal ethnicities and races. This may have come about as a result of Jane Addams’s conviction that the settlement was a neutral ground in terms of religious belief; the Christmas tableaux could be construed as embodying universal ethical elements because the lack of denominational specificity was a guard against religious observance. Christmas was a cultural celebration at Hull-House rather than a religious worship service.

Only in the Labor Museum’s exhibitions and in the shops where textiles and pottery were produced, and in the ethnic drama productions by Greek, Italian, and Jewish social groups had Hull-House prior to 1935 highlighted the specificity of ethnicity; in these cases the focus on ethnic arts and crafts were part of an effort to promote mutual appreciation and respect between different ethnic groups.

The introduction in 1938 of ethnically specific religious expression in the Christmas Tableaux was dangerously close to incorporating the religious observance of each group. What it may have risked in terms of neutrality it gained in the sense of authenticity and empowerment ethnic and racial groups experienced when they were able to demonstrate their faith in a public place alongside others from related religious traditions.

In a similar vein Jess Ogden described the manner in which theater functioned to bring “about a harmony of the various groups with which the settlement must work.” He noted that there was a large Mexican group that had three factions composed respectively of Catholics, Communists, and liberals. Someone in the Hull-House staff came up with the idea of having a real Mexican fiesta. This became an opportunity to unite the various factions. Hull-House during the Addams’ s years scheduled an Italian night or a German night, but never attempted to incorporate the Italian street festa as a vehicle for promoting mutuality and understanding between the various factions within the Italian community. Ogden explained how Hull-House used the Mexican fiesta: “The older people of all factions were invited to recall traditions and customs and to help with the planning of the carnival. The younger people went to work on pageants and plays, each faction planning something in which it was especially interested. The help of other actors were enlisted and three episodes in the history of Mexico were finally produced before an audience composed of the entire community in carnival mood. Not only did the factions forget their differences in admiring each other’s contributions, but also there resulted a better understanding on the part of other groups in the community.” Both Ogden and Helen Tieken Geraghty, who also worked on the carnival, believed that the change wrought by the fiesta was not merely temporary but had lasting value. [25]

Halsted Street is the best example of how Carr and Ogden used the arts to foster racial and ethnic integration and cooperation. Hodgman said Ogden wanted the play “to have guts” and believed it had the power to pull together “all the existing dramatic groups” and in addition, “dozens of others” including “neighborhood people as well as residents.” [26] She quoted Ogden as saying, “I’d like to tie up all these little crotchety groups we’ve got here at Hull House, get ’em to work together on one big project that is as socially significant as all Hell. Get a lot of residents in on it too. Be good for ’em.” [27]

One of the residents who joined the project was Donna Hodgman’s husband, Crosby, who was asked by Ogden to take the part of the streetcar conductor. [28] “All Hull House now waited, breathless and high—and I too,” Donna wrote. A week before the preview performance the whole concept clicked for Donna: “Now at last I saw the stage with five levels . . . and the blackouts. I heard the music and the speech chorus. I saw little short skits on all sorts of subjects because all subjects belonged to Halsted Street the longest street in Chicago.” [29]

Donna repeated the choral lyrics: “All race . . . all creeds . . . all colors . . . all degrees. Halsted Street was everything and everybody: Chicago and the world. Love was on Halsted Street, and fighting, and stealing, and dirt, and joy, and nobility.” [30]

The chorus of Halsted Street sang out: “Jane Addams saw and faced and met/These things that are to show/Hull-House must see, and face, and strive to meet. There’s a keener fire under the melting pot right now/Than culture. It is common need.” [31] The message of the play is that the issues of industrial democracy have immediacy in this era of the Great Depression and provide the experience all share: “This is our living, all around us/ This is neither Negro Mexican nor Greek/ Nor Jew, Italian, nor Irish/[32]

Halsted Street previewed on May 19, 1939, to an audience of Hull-House Associates, a group that Charlotte Carr had put together to develop national support for the settlement. Dr. Robert Morss Lovett, a former Hull-House resident, who now taught literature at the University of Chicago and was the editor of the New Republic, was the main speaker at the dinner that evening, followed by the production of the play, Halsted Street. [33] Following the preview for an audience who could pay one dollar for a ticket, the play was scheduled for the neighborhood, with tickets priced at fifteen cents.[34]

For Donna Hodgman, the play was a success: “Hundreds of people acted the parts of their own lives; hundreds of others saw, and could not avoid the knowledge that they saw themselves.” [35] She counted the success in the fact that “the warring factions of Hull House had learned to work together on a single project with unprecedented success. We knew that Mexicans, Negroes, Italians, Greeks, and just plain Americans had, for a little while, stood shoulder to shoulder.”[36] Yet a play is never the panacea for what ails an institution like Hull-House in 1939. Three years later the Hodgmans left. Donna had been completely exhausted by her Hull-House job as House Manager.[37]

Jess Ogden, who felt that with Halsted Street they had “reached the saturation point” on pushing issues of social significance, turned once more to using the stage as a way of “getting all those warring groups working together.” [38] His production of The Pirates of Penzance included “almost everyone who had anything to do with Hull House” and was a triumph in cooperation “all the more significant” since Ogden left the settlement in 1941, one month before the opera was produced.[39] His leaving was the result of continuing budget problems. It also signaled the end of Hull-House’s engagement with the rhetoric and style of the New Deal experiment with theater for the people. The following year, Charlotte Carr ended her five-year affiliation with Hull-House. In a dramatic and public declaration, Carr announced that she had been fired and accused the Hull-House trustees of censoring her political activities. While the trustees denied that Carr’s political activities were the reason for the break-up, her radical stances were definitely part of her conflict with the board.

Halsted Street reflects the pre-war New Deal Era; although we do not have a complete script of the play, what has been preserved clearly indicates the cultural and political point of view of the residents and staff whose support from federal funding allowed them a significant degree of independence to produce what, by 1942, might appear to be too controversial a production. The hope of American democracy and the overwhelming faith in the diverse people of the neighborhood to transcend their differences and forge a better world calls out to us from the fragments of the script, the handwritten stage directions, and the descriptions of the production contained in the unpublished manuscript by Donna Hodgman. In 2003, the play continues to evoke a sense of cosmopolitanism, of the dignity of work, and of the richness and promise of our nation’s immigrant foundations.

[1] Donna Hodgman, “A Vast Vagueness,”p. 1. People Live At Hull-House, unpublished ms., 1943, JAMC.

[2] “A Vast Flowing Vagueness,” p. 30.

[3] “Minutes,” October 27, 1938, Board of Trustees, HHA, HHA Records, JAMC, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

[4] “Minutes,” February 24, 1938, Folder 5, HHA Records, JAMC, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Minutes,” January 21, 1928, Folder 5, HHA Records, JAMC, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

[7] “Minutes,” January 27, 1939, March 24, 1939, September 22, 1939, January 26, 1940, December 17, 1941, January 28, 1944; Russell Ballard to Alma Petersen, October 21, 1952, Alma Petersen Correspondence Folder 309, HHA Records, JAMC.

[8] get citation.

[9] “Minutes,” December 1, 1942, HHA Records, JAMC.

[10] Hennie Reynders, [Hull-House Theatre Development: Management, Space and Buildings] from his essay “The Hull-House Theatre as Prosthetic Extension of Settlement Ideology, 1898-1933,” unpublished essay, 2003.

[11] Edith de Nancrede, “Dramatic Work at Hull-House,” Neighborhood (January 1928).

[12] Helen Tieken Geraghty, “Plans for the Work: The Development and Organization of a People’s Theatre at Hull-House,” typescript, 1939, Geraghty Collection, JAMC, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

[13] “Press Release,”1939, HHA Records, Folder 355.

[14] Hodgman, “Paint It White,” p. 15.

[15] “Press Release,” 1939.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Wm. P. Schenk, “Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg,” Halsted Street file, Folder 355, HHA Records, JAMC.

[18] Halsted Street file, Folder 355, HHA Records, JAMC.

[19] Patrick Schmitt, “The Chicago Federal Theatre Project: 1935-1939,” M.A. thesis, Communication and Theatre, the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, 1978.

[20] Milton Mayer, “Charlotte Carr—Settlement Lady,” Atlantic Monthly (December 1938): 741-748.

[21] Bryan and Davis, 100 Years At Hull-House, p. 229.

[22] Dewey R. Jones, “Integration at Hull-House,” in Bryan and Davis, 100 Years At Hull-House, pp. 230-231. This piece was excerpted from Jones’ report in the March 15, 1939, Minutes of the executive committee, Division on Education and Recreation, TMs, 7-9. Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago Papers, Box 145, Folder 1: Minorities. Manuscript Collection, Chicago Historical Society.

[23] Jones, “Integration at Hull-House,” p. 231.

[24] “Confusion and Recovery: 1935-1962” in Bryan and Davis, 100 Years At Hull-House, pp. 211-212.

[25] Jean Carter and Jess Ogden, Everyman’s Drama: A Study of the Noncommerical Theatre in the United States. New York: American Association for Adult Education, 1938, pp. 66-67.)

[26] “Paint It White,” p. 15.

[27] “Paint It White,” p. 15.

[28] “Paint It White,” p. 15.

[29]

[30] Ibid., p. 17.

[31] Halsted Street typescript, p. 7.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Minutes, April 19, 1939, Board of Trustees, HHA Records,

[34] “Paint It White, p. 17.

[35] Ibid., p. 18.

[36] Ibid., p. 19.

[37][37] Christopher Hodgman, M.D., “At Hull-House As A Boy, 1936-1942,” unpublished memoir, 2003.

[38]Hodgman, “The People,” p. 18, in “People Live at Hull-House.”

[39] Ibid., p. 19. Ogden joined the Extension Program of the University of Virginia and worked in the field of Adult Education. He was also active in the community theatre movement.

July 29, 2002July 29, 2026

Research in Jane Addams

This post is from a talk by Rima Lunin Schultz at Swarthmore College in 2002.

I’m dividing my talk into two parts to describe the two resources for studying Jane Addams of which I have a role:

The first is the reference book Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary, published by Indiana University Press in 2001. I am the co-editor. The handout I’ve prepared lists the Hull-House women, their allies, and women from the Near West Side of Chicago – in the vicinity of Hull-House – whose biographies can be found in WBC. A special feature of the separate biographies is that each one is followed by a substantial source paragraph that describes primary as well as secondary sources that were used in preparing the entry for our book. Our hope has been that such attention to primary sources –many not used before by scholars—will bring new generations of researchers to this material thereby promoting a new agenda for the history of women in the United States.

Why do these circles of women who intersected with Jane Addams in Chicago have value for re-discovering or rethinking her life and significance? Her meaning in United States history? Her place in women’s history? Her influence on social reform movements of her time?

The infrastructure of reform women in Progressive Era Chicago has been understood in a general way; Hull-House and Jane Addams have been viewed by historians including Kathryn Kish Sklar, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, as a central place for the personal and collective agendas of social feminists. Here women found a way to pursue meaningful engagement after college, to reconcile the family and the social claims of their mid-Victorian backgrounds, and to find support for enterprises they undertook which were creative and innovative. The women’s political culture which blossomed in the Progressive Era has also been described yet much more can be said about the participation of women in the political agendas of Progressivism. Our ten years of research on the lives of Chicago women demonstrated how immigrant women, African American women, Jewish and Catholic women all had parallel networks and, at different times, these coalitions of women intersected with the American born, white Protestant, middle class and affluent women generally associated with the women’s political culture and with social and reform movements.

Our aim in cross-referencing Jane Addams with other Chicago women is to plant her firmly and deeply in the infrastructure that, in fact, she influenced and was influenced by — to place her in the social environment of her times rather than to view her in isolation from these complex political, social and reform networks.

This brings me to the second resource I want to mention today. That is the Near West Side History Website, presently under construction at the University of Illinois at Chicago, of which I was recently appointed Interim Director. Our new title: The Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House, Hull House and It’s Neighborhoods, 1889-1963, describes the focus of our website: the “soil” in which Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr planted their experimental “seed” – and began a new process in the United States, the process of “settling” ; — Using historical photographs, maps, surveys, census reports, archival documents, printed materials and newspapers, books and magazines, architectural plans, art work, virtual reality 3-D reconstructions, and street tours we will utilize the phenomenal technology of the website to visually and textually build the socio-economic and geographic, physical and cultural spaces of the Near West Side. Narrating the events and participants of Hull-House in this thick description of the neighborhoods in the settlement’s vicinity, we want to fully explore its social history; in this way we plan to “link” Jane Addams to the women and men who made up the political, social, and reform infrastructures that were at work locally and nationally.

The strength of our website is in our use of local documents, often one of a kind and difficult for scholars to find without spending large amounts of time in Chicago-area depositories and archives. We are a website that provides an in-depth, one of a kind collection of an urban neighborhood, one which so it happens, has received from the 1890s on, enormous attention from journalists, reformers, social scientists, public health officials, and from the local leadership of settlements, religious institutions, ethnic organizations, and municipal agencies. For example, we are able to connect the early development of the playground and recreation training from Hull-House and its first male resident, Edward Burchard, to the construction of parks and recreation centers throughout Chicago and to the development of the courses given by the Civics and Philanthropy School, the precursor of the Recreation Training School in Chicago and the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Photographs of the parks, annual reports, articles in magazines and newspapers allow users of the website the opportunity examine through what might be termed “case studies” the way in which urban neighborhoods were actually transformed through the implementation of new concepts of cultural and recreational space first experimented with at Hull-House.

Again, the local papers of other settlements in Chicago speak directly to Jane Addams’s connection to their endeavors, as do writings by leading residents of settlements throughout the United States. The local scene on the Near West Side can reveal the dynamics of this absorption and dissemination of new ideas. [show text of Henry Booth Settlement]

We know that Addams was a talented and prolific writer whose articles in magazines such as the Ladies Home Journal popularized her ideas. The Near West Side site brings to scholars primary materials which will address Addams’s style of leadership as a social and political activist and as a coalition builder and even as a model of democratic behavior in an ethnically, religiously and racially diverse urban community.

And now, a final point about the nature of archival resources and the opportunities and dangers of websites. This seems a good place to bring up the issue of historical editing of photographs and other visual images. We have what is called a jpeg library for our website of more than 5,000 scanned-in images. Among these are many images of Jane Addams and her Hull-House colleagues. Some are similar or the same images that appear in Swarthmore’s photography galleries on your website, and I’m sure, there are many websites with images of Jane Addams. In preparing our jpegs for linkage with our website, we have come across lots of documentation questions: inaccurate or no dates; inaccurate or missing identifications of others in shots with Addams; inaccurate captions written on photos either at the time the image was originally taken or at a later date (and we don’t know for sure when); inaccurate information from archives themselves about the original photos they own. Websites, like any other reference works, ought to comply with the highest standards of historical editing. Even more so, since the proliferation of mis-information is more rapid and far-reaching when the mistake is on the internet highway. So, Ellen Skerrett, project coordinator of our site, has prepared a short visual presentation that underscores both the increased opportunity for exchange via the internet, and the need for a collective effort in which we should all engage to share information and reconcile conflicts in our documentation regarding images.

We are showing you a series of portraits of Jane Addams, each one in comparison to others found in different archives, has a problem. In focusing in on what some might consider just a minor detail, the chi-ro cross worn by Jane Addams in portraits taken between [ ] and []. As Ellen points out, in the Swarthmore photo which we think is the same image as one we have, i.e. the 1892 Alice Kellogg Tyler portrait, Jane Addams is definitely wearing a pin; while the outlines of the Chi-Rho cross are clearly visible in our image, it’s hard to make out in the Swarthmore photo. Was it shaded in over time? Deliberately? Accidently? No writer on Addams has mentioned her wearing of this Christian symbol or has tied it with another settlement head resident, Mary E. McDowell, who also wore a Chi-Rho cross. Was it worn to signify a sisterhood of settlement women? After we do not find this pin in photos of Jane Addams. Was there a reason she stopped wearing it? There are differences of opinion among scholars about Jane Addams’s religious affiliation and beliefs. Can this photobiographical detail add any insight about this aspect of her life?

June 18, 1997July 21, 2026

The Social Gospel of Ellen Gates Starr, 1880-1920

This post was written by Dr. Rima Lunin Schultz in June 1997, and presented at the Episcopal Church and Archives Conference, “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Anglican Visions of Apocalypse and Hope.”

Hull-House, the social settlement Jane Addams founded with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, has come to symbolize one of the most successful and creative responses to the problems of industrial society ever undertaken. Much of what happened there is credited to Addams’ leadership and she remains a figure of national and international importance in the fields of social reform and peace. In comparison, Ellen Gates Starr remains a supporting character whose claim to fame is that she was there at the beginning. Indeed, for Starr, the settlement was only the start of a lifelong journey to translate her radical idealism into everyday practice; it was the first of many initiatives Starr tried out in her quest to make her professed faith in Christianity a living, breathing organic part of her existence. The following is the story of the way in which Starr’s religious convictions formed her radical consciousness and emboldened her to take great risks for her ideals.

Ellen Gates Starr was born in 1859 to an abolitionist family from New England, who had settled in Illinois. As a young girl her father’s involvement with the local grange and his advocacy of a cooperative system over the vicious competition in America sensitized her to view the individual in the social context. Intellectual freedom prevailed in the household as well as strong support of women’s equality; her sister Mary became an artist, her brother William a sculptor; two cousins were art photographers and another cousin, Beatrice Starr Jenkins, became an architect in Chicago. (1)

Her father’s sister, Eliza Allen Starr, had a profound influence also. A New England Unitarian spinster who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1854 and became the leading exponent of Catholic Art and literature in the Midwest, her art studio near the Cathedral church in downtown Chicago, was one of the few places where books and reproductions of medieval and renaissance religious art were available. Eliza Starr advocated the social purpose of art in modern society fearing that the human spirit was at risk in the industrial environment. Supporting herself as a writer and lecturer on art and religion, she ran an art school. (2)

Thus Starr already had an appreciation and sympathy for catholic liturgy and art when she arrived at Rockford Seminary where she was required to attend daily chapel services and weekly prayer meetings in preparation for a traditional Protestant conversion experience. Immediately Starr knew this was not her route to religion. With family resources limited, Starr remained at Rockford for only one year, planning to reenter another college later. She began teaching school, first in a small country town near her family home and in 1879, in Chicago. The next four years were difficult ones; she grappled with her religious feelings, in 1881 attempted to prepare for the Harvard Annex (Radcliffe College), and that same summer, suffered a nervous breakdown that forced her into inactivity for several weeks. This was a period of experimentation with visits to a variety of churches, wide reading in English literature (Dickens and George Eliot), history and philosophy (Carlyle and Ruskin), and studies in Anglicanism including Maurice and Kingsley. In 1883 Starr joined the Episcopal Church with some hesitancy but profoundly desirous of getting on with her life. (3) She looked to her friend, Jane Addams, to sort out what that future might hold.

Ellen Starr had met Jane Addams the year she studied at Rockford College. The friendship continued largely through letters in which the two discussed politics, literature, religion and what was the major preoccupation of them both, the quest for useful, morally significant work. This quest for a vocation, not just employment, was fraught with a variety of concerns. Both women were in their mid-to-late twenties; they were not interested in marriage. Well-read, consumed by intellectual ideas about life rather than by experience, they formed a bond with each other in their desire to chart a new, unconventional course. (4)

In 1887 Addams invited Starr to accompany her to Europe and Ellen accepted Addams’ offer to pay her expenses. (5) An intense experience, Starr loved European art and traveled to religious shrines including Monte Cassino and Assisi. She was inspired by what she observed about the Benedictine Rule when she visited Monte Cassino. The idea of work as prayer captured her attention as dramatically as Jane Addams’ attention was captured when she visited Toynbee Hall settlement in the East London slum. After their return from Europe the two women began to plan a similar venture in Chicago. The two saw Toynbee as the answer to both personal and reform goals: they could create a “home” for themselves and also do meaningful work. “Jane’s idea which she puts very much to the front and on no account will give up,” Starr wrote, “is that it is more for the benefit of the people who do it [settlement work] than for the other class [the poor in the slums]. She has worked that out of her own experience and ill health.” (6)

While Starr and Addams agreed that they both “needed” the settlement as much or more than the people in the neighborhood “needed” such a place, it is not clear whether or not they held the same vision about what the settlement would actually do. Or, perhaps at this early stage neither one had a clear sense. At age thirty-one Starr was already more preoccupied with working out the message of the social gospel she embraced in her desire to be a good Christian. In her mind the settlement would be a place where a religiously grounded fellowship addressed her concern for social as well as personal holiness. This difference in motivation was significant and within three years it was clear to both women that they had different goals for the settlement and themselves. As a practical matter, the two divided up the work of the settlement with Starr devoting herself to art, literature, and crafts, a result of her interest in Ruskin and Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement and Addams became the public spokesperson for the idea of the settlement as well as its fund-raiser.

On the personal level Starr and Addams distanced themselves from the emotional bond they had initially forged. How much their clash over Starr’s emphasis on the religious aspects of the settlement idea brought about this wedge is difficult to measure. Addams’ friendship with Mary Rozet Smith, who assumed the role of Jane’s closest and most intimate friend signaled the change that had taken place on the personal level. (7)

With the arrival of Julia Lathrop in 1890 and Florence Kelley in December 1891, Hull-House embarked on the road of social science. (8) Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop were already exploring this direction and Kelley’s knowledge of European Marxism and her university training in economics fostered a turn away from the Christian socialism expressed in Starr’s approach. Kelley and trade union leader Alzina Parsons Stevens began to collect statistics for the Illinois Bureau of Labor on the sweatshops that proliferated in the Hull-House neighborhood. (9) The factory inspection act passed in 1893 gave credibility to the investigative approach, although in the long run it would take decades before the courts outlawed sweatshops.

Lathrop and Kelley constructed moral arguments on behalf of less privileged social groups, immigrants, workers exposed to industrial hazards, women and men working more than ten hours a day, poor families generally, and child laborers, and they appealed to the State to become more activist in the protection of these groups. (10) Hull-House Maps and Papers, published in 1895 exemplified the way in which the new science of human relations was used by Hull-House women reformers with articles reporting research results on sweatshop labor, child labor, and labor organizations for working women.

Starr’s contribution, “Art and Labor” was a contrast: anti-capitalist and anti-modernist, Starr warned that it was not enough to fight for wages, you had also to fight for the soul of man against the commercial and industrial world that was crushing him. Her writing is starkly different than what develops as a maternalist-social science argument for the State assuming the protection of those who are weak. Starr, unlike the majority of women progressive reformers, did not base her social justice arguments on maternalist reasoning. She neither singled women out for special protection nor did she believe that women’s differences came out of essential nurturing qualities that, when expanded to societal problems, enhanced their capacity to bring about social transformation. (11)

In contrast to the others, she was searching for something close to a sacramental community that men and women settlement workers and poor people would share together, but both the church and the settlement were neglecting the religious function in modern society: the settlement in its increasing secularism; and the church in its neglect of “social holiness” in favor of “personal holiness.” (12)

Remaining a resident at Hull-House, Starr carved out her own space and developed a support system in Chicago and elsewhere to sustain her sense of a community of social holiness. (13) Even her room at Hull-House was more like a monastic cell than a bedroom in a Victorian home. She rose early every morning and either attended religious services at a neighborhood Catholic church or had private prayer and meditation. (14) Jane Addams, Starr reported, had accused her of “running after strange doctrines.”(15) She had her local chapter of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, (SCHC) a lay order of Episcopal women dedicated to social justice. It provided a corporate intellectual and spiritual life, a sisterhood, that included her friend Vida Scudder and others. Starr missed this at Hull House where, by the 1890s, the earlier custom of group prayer inaugurated by Starr had been replaced by a women’s political culture that had little place for corporate forms of worship and barely tolerated Starr’s religious activities.

Starr was drawn to Vida Scudder and her writings on St. Francis. Starr and Scudder became leading exponents of a self-consciously and openly religious approach to reform. They saw the settlement as a model for an alternative value system which spurned the material rewards of American society for a new ‘Franciscanism.’ Starr, Scudder, Social Gospel theologian George Herron, Episcopalian priests W. D. P. Bliss, R. Heber Newton, and James O. S. Huntington believed that a reordering of society had to take place and those who controlled wealth and property had to recognize their sins of greed and selfishness. They had to see that their luxury depended on the misery and privation of oppressed workers. (16)

By the 1890s Starr had found solace and support at Denison House in Boston with Scudder and Helen Dudley and spent time in Boston away from Hull-House affairs. The Denison group was influenced by Huntington, whose spiritual counsel could be seen in the development of the Companions and in the maturation of Starr’s religious ideas. (17) Huntington was a frequent guest at Hull-House prior to 1892 when the direction of the settlement was still malleable, although Starr’s request for his appearances met resistance from the more secular residents. What was missing, obviously, was the cross-class alliance: a community of believers that was not class segregated. (18)

Reality and the opportunity to create this community of believers entered Hull-House with the arrival of neighborhood garment workers who were encouraged by the settlement residents to use the meeting rooms for union meetings. Trade unionist Mary Kenney became a resident. In 1896 Starr participated in her first garment workers’ strike. Immediately demonstrating her desire to identify with the strikers, Starr organized relief for the workers and with Mary Kenney rushed ahead to St. Louis, Missouri, to meet a train headed for Chicago with scabs brought in to break the strike. Starr and Kenney boarded the train in the middle of the night and at breakfast lectured the men on the conditions that led to the strike. Persuaded, the men joined the union and offered their support. The strike was lost and Starr turned her attention to relocating blacklisted strikers and exhorting tailors to keep the union intact despite their losses. (19)

This was her first real engagement with the violence of labor disputes. Frazzled and exhausted, she left for New York for a prolonged period. She had operated so differently from Jane Addams who had been approached by the Chicago Civic Federation to call for arbitration for the strike. (20) This was the beginning of a lifelong pattern for Starr: she rejected roles of arbitrator, mediator, or negotiator between the classes just as she had rejected the role of social science observer and institutional bureaucrat. Her radical idealism interpreted the social gospel message rather literally. She determined that her fate would be with the oppressed and the downtrodden. Starr had no trouble identifying which side to join and she did so with religious zeal.

These involvements, however were exhausting and somewhat artificial. Starr not only identified with the cause of the worker, she wanted to be a artisan herself. In the summer of 1898 Starr sailed to England for a fifteen-month apprenticeship with Arts and Crafts bookbinder Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson. (21) She had decided to become a worker and teacher, to identify more closely with the poor by taking up manual labor, and to teach others to find joy and dignity in the simple life of a craftsman. This way she would protest the economic arrangements of modern industrial capital. When she returned wealthy Hull-House patron Mary Wilmarth provided Starr with funds to set up a bindery. Unfortunately, only two or three students a year were able to study, the materials were costly, and Starr was forced to work on commissions for wealthy patrons. (22) It was a terrible irony not missed by Starr.

Starr turned to what appeared a more fruitful agenda: organizing women for the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). Other non-workingclass reformers and settlement residents had searched for ways to help American workingwomen. The traditional male craft unions were reluctant to organize women, assuming that they were unreliable, transitory workers who would leave work to marry. In addition, immigrant women had filled the sweatshops and, in the eyes of the male artisans, had contributed to the deskilling of the garment industry. (23) Young women, on the other hand, found it difficult to enter the world of male trade unionism because of the masculine culture of the union hall; often meeting rooms were above saloons. Ellen Starr and other settlement reformers saw a need to come to the aid of working-class girls who they knew were exploited at work and ignored by the labor movement. The WTUL was organized in 1903 to assist in the organization of women wage workers into trade unions. With the cooperation of Samuel Gompers and the AFL, the organization was permitted and actually encouraged, membership of non-wage-earners. WTUL branch chapters agreed to affiliate with AFL central labor committees. The first slate of officers in 1903 included: Mary Morton Kehew, a socially Bostonian, president; Jane Addams, vice-president; Mary Kenney (O’Sullivan), secretary. (24) In Chicago the local chapter of the WTUL organized at Hull-House. (25) Tensions between the wealthy and middle-class allies and the trade union women existed from the beginning. The allies advocated investigation of factory conditions, legislative lobbying, and educational classes, activities many trade union women considered derivative from a focus on direct organizing. On the national level, Gompers’ ambivalence about the role of non-workers in the union continued to plague the allies in the WTUL. (26)

Starr continued to work through the Episcopal Church for social change in these years, primarily with the Companions. Among the mainline denominations, the Episcopal Church was the most visionary in its rethinking of the conventional economic theories of laissez-faire capitalism and the application of Jesus’ social gospel to the contemporary wage labor system was a radical departure, even when conceived in the context of a non-violent system of mediation between labor and capital rather than a revolutionary end to private property. Yet the church continued to be an exclusive community of wealthy parishioners whose connections to the ruling class were undeniable. Here was a church able not only to produce James Huntington and Vida Scudder and, in its capacity to allow differences to flourish, gave these Christian Socialists the space to grow. But the church was also one of the major institutional strongholds of private property. It represented wealth and the power wealth had to shape the society.

Ellen Starr heard Charles Palmerston Anderson, bishop of Chicago during the garment workers’ strikes, tell propertied Episcopalians that when men used the might of money to stand out against organized and disorganized women and children over the principle of collective bargaining, they were taking a position not endorsed by the Christian church. “I believe in God,” he told his flock, “therefore I believe in the right of bargaining.” (27) The same Bishop Anderson was adept at businessmen back to Christian activism and encouraging them to join the Laymen’s Missionary Movement; at home in Chicago he set the tone for an activist, red-blooded and masculine Christianity by incorporating the leading capitalists who were members of Episcopal congregations in decision-making at the highest diocesan-wide level. Anderson, like social gospelers Walter Rausenbusch and Washington Gladden, had not called revolution or the end to private property. They had accepted the need to include associations of workers at the table with capitalists and, along general Christian ethical principles, negotiate from within the system to benefit labor and capital alike. (28)

For Starr this was too conservative an answer. “How can we tolerate it that life should go on so–all the suffering of little children, all the waste and squalor and brutality and misery of a system which might be changed,” she wrote a friend. “Nothing is worth thinking of at all in comparison to that.” (29)

Mainline Protestants were in general agreement by 1900 that the church and religion were about “here and now.” “We are beginning to realize,” wrote an Episcopal churchman in the diocesan newspaper, “that the Church and religion are concerned chiefly with men and women in this life, with their daily duties and obligations; that if we live as God would have us live in this world we need not be anxious about the world to come.” (30)

What continued to depress Ellen Starr, however, was the failure of the social gospel message to ignite a radical transformation inside the churches and, without that, there was little hope for change in society as a whole. Most laborers worked in oppressive conditions and lived substandard housing. With seasonal layoffs and economic depressions children and women as well as men worked to survive. The churches were doing enough because their members, the wealthy and powerful, were not motivated to change the way the economy actually worked. When Starr returned from the Society for the Companions of the Holy Cross summer conference in 1909 she felt the gap between the words that were spoken at the highest levels of ecclesiastical institutions and the conditions of the poor. Attending services with other Episcopalians became increasingly difficult as she felt surrounded by privilege and social pretension. She had written earlier, “The Ancient Egyptian priests had one religion for themselves and another for the people, and how like them we often are.” (31) It hurt her the way civil rights activists were hurt and resented the segregated churches they attended, especially when lip service was given to the movement for racial equality.

Starr began to attend Catholic parish churches in the Hull-House neighborhood because she identified with the poor. (32) Now she decided to look closely at what Roman Catholicism might offer her. In her case, this transition was not out of character; she was drawn to the ceremony, the mystery, the symbolism of Catholicism. In 1907 she collapsed from nervous exhaustion and spent a month in a sanitarium followed by weeks of recuperation. Struggling with depression, she was disappointed in her failure to expand the bindery at Hull-House into a successful employment venture. At age forty-nine having had her application rejected for residence in a communitarian experiment in Tennessee run by Huntington’s Order of the Holy Cross, she went abroad to live in relative isolation on a farm in Ireland. She came back to the States in 1909 to begin a new life. “I… went to pieces and decided I was a failure. But I did have the vitality left to ask God to give me another chance–an eleventh hour chance to serve.” (33) But she continued to wander from church group to labor union, from Socialist Party politics to private tutoring from a Roman Catholic priest who gently, persistently, patiently counseled her and deflected her abusive criticism of the Roman Catholic hierarchy until she was ready to convert. (34)

In all this, Starr continued to actively participate in the labor struggle. In 1910 when a group of courageous women walked out of their shop at Hart, Schaffner & Marx in Chicago, they ignited the spark caused the unorganized workers in Chicago’s male-dominated establishments to rise in rebellion against their employers. Starr, as a member of the WTUL picket committee, promptly joined strikers on the picket lines, patrolled the streets, and served as a witness in court for strikers arrested without due cause. (35) As the strike dragged on Starr appealed everywhere for support of the strike, including the Christian evangelical community where she successfully obtained endorsement for the strike from the Laymen’s Evangelistic Council. The Episcopal Diocese of Chicago also endorsed the strike. (36)

Shortly after the Garment Workers’ Strike Starr joined the Party, and while it was a far cry from the genteel utopian visions of William Morris or the Fabians, Ellen Starr had come a long way from the inexperienced dreamer who had begun Hull-House in 1889. Starr fit in with the Marxist, hard-line, predominantly immigrant organization and although middle-class social workers were discouraged from joining, by 1915 she was serving on the Cook County Socialist Party’s executive committee. (37) She was able to do this even while deepening her commitment to Christianity. For Starr, her labor union radicalism seemed to draw her more deeply into her faith, or perhaps, the arduous task of standing up for the workers, against the wealthy and powerful, could only be endured by her through the strength of her religious convictions. It was her vision of the implementation of the social gospel here on earth that continued to inspire and sustain her as much as the realities of oppressive conditions stirred her rebellion. When she ran for alderman of the Nineteenth Ward as a socialist she explained her credo: “I became a Socialist because I was a Christian. The Christian religion teaches that all men are to be regarded as brothers, that no one should wish to profit by the loss or disadvantages of others…that none should enjoy ‘two coats’ while others are coatless. Civilized life is in grotesque contrast to all this. Only socialism promised to put down the mighty from their seats and to exalt the humble and meek; to fill the hungry with good things and to send the rich, if not quite ’empty away,’ at least relieved of some of their unnecessary and arrogant fulness [sic].” (38)

In the textile strike of 1913, Starr battled the manufacturers to help the workers secure sixty percent of their demands. It was her first successful strike and buoyed her for her next foray into the eye of the storm. On March 6, 1914, at age fifty-five, Starr was brought to trial on a charge of disorderly conduct stemming from her behavior on the picket line at a waitresses’ strike in Chicago. She had shouted at the police, who had unjustly arrested three waitresses on picket duty, “I am a citizen and as such protest this arrest.” The crowd became excited and it was reported that they shouted “Kill the police.” Bail was provided by Mary Wilmarth longtime friend and patron of Starr and Hull-House; her son-in-law, Harold Ickes, served as Starr’s trial attorney and, after eight hours deliberation at its conclusion, a jury found her innocent. (39) Within a few months of her trial she sailed to Europe to make another tour of the medieval shrines, revisiting Assisi and the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino.

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) strike of 1915 was a different experience, and placed Ellen Starr in the difficult position of disagreeing with almost everyone but the strikers themselves and a few radical friends. This strike, unlike earlier ones, did not receive the support of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) or the American Federation of Labor (AFL), two of the strongest labor organizations in the nation and, in times past, allies with Starr. AFL president Samuel Gompers urged his followers not to support the garment strikers led by Sidney Hillman’s ACWA because it had seceded from the AFL-affiliated United Garment Workers 1914. Gompers argued that Hillman’s defection threatened union unity. During the course of the strike, from October to December, over 1,700 strikers were arrested and two were killed. Starr herself was arrested several times for “inciting a riot” and insisted on a jury trial to bring the facts to the public. (40)

In the end neither side won a decisive victory. The manufacturers’ association created to oppose the ACWA signed no agreements and refused to submit its differences with the strikers to arbitration. The centrist head of the American Federation of Labor and one of, if not the most powerful, labor leaders in the United States, Samuel Gompers, debated Ellen Starr in the pages of the New Republic. Distrustful of middle-class allies whose interests could never be the same as the working class, and increasingly hostile to socialists, he told Starr to stay out of labor’s business. Starr blamed the loss on the “heavy hand of Mr. Gompers.” Without AFL support the strikers had to depend upon middle-class allies. (41)

The strike had been a failure but out of it, radical union leaders of the two leading garment unions, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America had won control from conservative union officials. The new union leaders, as well as the rank and file, demanded that their union reflect their own special vision of society, a cooperative commonwealth in which justice and equal opportunity provided the guiding principles. Women union leaders especially called for programs to expand the cultural, intellectual, and social horizons of their members. Starr, praised by its president, Sidney Hillman, was made an honorary member of the ACWA for her role in the union’s success. (42)

Ellen Starr’s battle with the Episcopal Church most likely was more difficult that going against Samuel Gompers. In some ways Gompers, who did well with the conservative social gospel churchmen, (43) was more like the propertied leadership than the rank and file strikers she had met on the picket lines. At any rate, tired and reluctant to attend General Convention in 1919, she had been persuaded by her longtime friend Vida Scudder to attend. Nineteen-nineteen was the year the church launched its nation-wide campaign as part of its organizational restructuring. In the 1880s Christians hoped to apply the Golden Rule to the social problems of industrial America to save society. In the 1920s, business methods were brought to the church to save Christianity. Like other corporations, the church had become nationalized; social gospel work was now coordinated in a department of social service. A fund was created to operate the new bureaucracy. (44)

Starr was sixty-one at the time of her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Becoming part of a Catholic intellectual community in Chicago, she joined a circle of educated Catholics who shared her interest including Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, both in residence at the University of Chicago, hardly the common folk in the parish churches, but in many ways the closest intellectual relatives to the Anglo-Catholics of her youth. Always the maverick, she defended Lenin and the Russian Revolution, read Gerard Manley Hopkins, and made appeals for Sacco and Vanzetti’s commutation from their death sentences. Increasingly, ill health and simple old age kept Ellen Starr from more activist involvements

She affiliated herself, finally, with a Benedictine monastery and became an oblate in the third order of St. Benedict. (45) She died in Suffern, New York in 1940.

By 1920, a conservative, non-socialist “social gospel” had been incorporated into mainstream Protestantism as the institutions of Christianity began to take on the organizational structure of the business corporation itself. The “social gospel” of the twentieth-century church recognized religion’s social service responsibility to a broad public but no longer pitted itself against the social injustices of industrialism. In essence, the social gospel had become a generalized acceptance of institutional religion’s connection with the social life of the nation. By 1920 Ellen Starr saw little hope in organized religion’s revolutionary potential.

Starr was uncompromising, self-critical, and ultimately, a minority voice who saw in the successes of progressive social reform the death of the revolutionary gospel spirit that had awakened her conscience and whole generation of idealists in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1892, only three years after its opening, Starr accused Hull-House of being merely “an excuse for the things we ought to do and be and don’t and aren’t.” (46)

“We” was not a figure of speech; Starr was self-critical and uncompromising in the demands she made of herself. She was also prophetic. Few of her generation remained true to the radical idealism inherent in the social gospel message; the majority became convinced that social legislation, collective bargaining and the expansion of political rights could make the economic system more democratic and alleviate the worst abuses of industrial capitalism. Theirs was a quest for a social ethic that would mediate between the classes, not end the class structure; would negotiate among the competitive elements in society, not end competition; and would apply a secularized social gospel message as a civic platform.

Starr held fast to the conviction that a fundamental reordering society must take place. This reordering could not come without a spiritual renewal of the individual leading to the restructuring of society to a collectivist and religious social ethic. Starr found all the institutional structures to which she gave her devotion and commitment ultimately incapable of bringing about this reordering–neither the settlement house, the Socialist Party, the labor movement, or the Episcopal Church were able to give the kind of leadership and support Starr had hoped to find.

Endnotes:

(1) Polly H. Ullrich, “Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement of Chicago: 1877-1915,” M.A. Thesis, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1994.

(2) Archibald J. Byrne, “Eliza Allen Starr,” Notable American Women 1607-1950. A Biographical Dictionary. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, editors. Harvard University Press, 1971, vol. III, 350-351; the Rev. James McGovern, The Life and Letters of Eliza Allen Starr. 1904.

(3) Elizabeth Palmer Carrell, “Reflections in a Mirror: The Progressive Woman and the Settlement Experience,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 1981, 92, 100-101.

(4) Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1910. See Starr-Addams Correspondence in Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection (EGS/SSC), Smith College. See: Jennifer Lynne Bosch, “The Life of Ellen Gates Starr, 1859-1940,” Ph.D. dissertation, Miami University of Ohio, 1990.

(5) Carrell, 109.

(6) Ellen Starr to Mary Blaisdell, Feb. 23, 1889, EGS/SSC.

(7) Jennifer Bosch, “The Life of Ellen Gates Starr,” 76; Carrell, diss., 177-178.

(8) Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women’s Work in the 1890s” in Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., The Social Survey in Historical Perspective 1880-1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

(9) Carolyn Daniel McCreesh, Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 1880-1917. Garland Publishing, 1985, 65; Residents of Hull-House, Hull-House Maps and Papers. Arno Press & The New York Times, 1970 reprint.

(10) Sklar, 117-118.

(11) I come to this conclusion because the absence of writings or activities between 1880 and 1920 on the part of Starr in relation to women’s organizations or the suffrage question. Addams takes on major leadership roles in the suffrage battle after 1900 and writes important popular arguments in the maternalist vein in favor of women voting. Starr appears not to have been involved. Female social gospelers such as Frances E. Willard, a Christian Socialist and the president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, linked their arguments for the coming kingdom on earth with a special role for morally superior women. Starr makes no arguments of this nature.

(12) Ellen Starr, “Settlement Life,” 1896, Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. She describes an almost mystical relationship in which settlement workers enter into the life of the community.

(13) Looking at “List of Members,” S.C.H.C., in 1884, 1887, 1888, 1890, 1892, 1894, Ellen Gates Starr is listed for the first time in 1894.

(14) Carrell, 134-135; Mary Prentice Lillie Barrows, “God and My Mother,” mss., 312, Box 3, Frances Crane Lillie Papers, Chicago Historical Society.

(15) Ellen Starr to Mary Allen, c. 1894/95, EGS/SSC, Box VII.

(16) Vida Scudder, On Journey. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1937, 240-241; Carrell, 3; Ellen Starr, “A Bypath into the Great Roadway,” Catholic World vol. 119, May 1924, 179.

(17) Ellen Starr, “A Bypath into the Great Roadway,” 179.

(18) Huntington had great difficulty balancing the demands of his contemplative life with settlement work. In 1892 the Order of the Holy Cross left the East Side of New York and settled in rural Maryland. D.G. Paz, “Monasticism and Social Reform,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, vol. XLVIII, #1, March 1979, pp. 56-57.

(19) Carrell, 233-234.

(20) Ibid.

(21) See Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

(22) Carrell, 301-305.

(23) Elizabeth Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League, University of Illinois, 1988. This book discusses the Chicago league and its relationship to Hull-House residents.

(24) McCreesh, Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 86-88.

(25) Payne.

(26) McCreesh, 66-67; 125-127.

(27) Charles L. Street quoting Bishop Charles P. Anderson, Memorial Sermon, The Diocese of Chicago, 1936.

(28) Rima Lunin Schultz, “The Making of An American Church: Cathedral Ideal and Parish Realities. The Episcopal Church in Illinois, 1834-1946,” unpublished mss., 1986. Archives, Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. See especially chapters eight and nine.

(29) Carrell, 343.

(30) The Diocese of Chicago, April 1910, 10.

(31) “Chicago’s Hull-House,” Report on the Address by Ellen Starr, 1895, Hull-House Scrapbook, III, JAMC.

(32) Carrell, 344.

(33) Starr to Wager, Hull-House, February 12, 1917, EGS/SSC, Box VIII.

(34) Carrell, 398-400.

(35) Women’s Trade Union League of Chicago, Official Report of the Strike Committee, 10.

(36) Official Report of the Strike Committee, Garment Workers’ Strike, Oct. 29, 1910-February 1911, Women’s Trade Union League, Microfilm, Chicago Historical Society. Thekla Ellen Caldwell, “Women, Men, and Revival: The Third Awakening in Chicago,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1991.

(37) Carrell, 357.

(38) Clipping, “Why I am A Socialist: Miss Starr to Stick in Race,” February 10, 1916, Ellen Gates Starr Biographical File, Chicago History Museum.

(39) Carrell, 357-358.

(40) McCreesh, 218-220. The exchange of letters between Gompers and Starr were published in the New Republic January 1916- March 1916.

(41) Ibid.

(42) Carrell, 364.

(43) Elizabeth and Kenneth Fones-Wolf, “Trade-Union Evangelism: Religion and the AFL in the Labor Forward Movement, 1912-1916” in Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society. Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., University of Illinois Press, 1983.

(44) Schultz, “Making of An American Church,” 561-562.

(45) Carrell, 412-413.

(46) Carrell, 30.