Category: People

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

By Rima Lunin Schultz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Ann Keating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hull House and Benny Goodman

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Cynthia Francis Gensheimer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Excavating the History of Women and the Peace Movement

The peace movement dominates Jane Addams’s work from 1914 until her death in 1935. Working through the Woman’s Peace Party, the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Addams worked with her counterparts in many nations in a global movement to bring about peace, social justice, and equality.  She also served as the de facto leader of the American women’s peace movement.

Our detailed focus on the content of the documents and our efforts to identify the people mentioned in them yields a different kind of history than one that only focuses on the leaders of movements.  As we have begun publishing WILPF documents from both the United States and abroad, we are finding the names of early adherents, donors, and activists and adding them to the project’s database.

We know about Emily Greene Balch, Crystal Eastman, and Lucy Biddle Lewis, who were Addams’s coworkers for peace in the United States. But what about the rank and file? The women whose dollar donations funded the work of the WILPF? It turns out that within Jane Addams’s correspondence, we can learn about them too.

Eleanor Daggett Karsten, the secretary of the Woman’s Peace Party and then the United States Section of the WILPF, updated Addams every few weeks in 1920 with information about the women joining the new league, founded in 1919 at the International Congress of Women. As a document to add to our edition, I have to admit that each time I saw one of these multi-page columnar lists, I sighed, knowing that this one document might take a week or more to completely enter into our system due to the number of names. Thankfully, most of these lists contained street addresses, which made it easier (though not always easy!) to identify the women.

It didn’t take long to realize that instead of drudgery, adding the names of the early members of the WILPF was historical excavation of the best kind. Our biographical work is carried out in two steps. First the student or editor who enters the document into our system tries to link the name on the document to an existing name in our database. We use an Omeka-based system and a plug-in called Item Relations, to search the more than 12,0000 names in the system. When the person is not there, we add them. In this stage, the goal is to simply identify the person so that we are sure they are not duplicated and that we have verified their basic information.

We strive to add birth and death dates, full names, and a short biography, which we don’t publish until the second stage, when a student researcher does more in-depth work and drafts a full biography. Our goal is to then create relationships between the people in the edition and the organizations and events they participated in. This social network of Addams’s world being built slowly document by document, is one of the results of the project that we are most excited about. It will take time to build the data up, but it is time well spent.

For women, that means that “Mrs. Jerome H. Frank on 168 Hamptondale Road in Hubbard Woods, Illinois,” becomes “Florence Kiper Frank (1887?-?)” A draft biography, that isn’t publicly available yet notes that she was a member of the United States Section of the WILPF and was married to lawyer Jerome H. Franks and had a daughter named Barbara. Much of this comes from census records (having a street address on these lists is an enormous help),  local newspapers, and other web-based resources to get accurate information.  We create a bibliography pointing to the sources used so that others can follow our trail.

It is extremely exciting to find a photograph of the women, often in the U.S. Passport Applications that we access via Ancestry.com. Though the images are not of the best quality, hopefully we can add scanned originals at some point in the future.  We have also found that having even these short biographical stubs accessible on the web means that family members can find the project and see the associations that their ancestors had with Addams and peace. We have already received some photographs and biographical information from family members and hope that this will increase as we add more names.

Some of the more challenging research revolves around women who worked for peace outside the United States. There are many complicating factors—misspelled or partial names, the lack of genealogical resources for most non-English speaking countries, lack of language skills among our staff to read and search foreign-language resources (Google Translate only helps so much!), and often a lack of detailed geographical  information about where they lived.  Many of these peace activists are hard to trace through World War II, as records of pacifists and peace organizations often did not survive the war.

But adding them, even with partial names and limited dates, accomplishes something. As we enter more documents and move into the 1920s and 1930s, we uncover the names of those who participated in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and in time we will learn more about their lives as well.

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A Japanese Visitor at Hull-House

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.

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.”

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.

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Hull-House of Possibilities

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 18th 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.”

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.

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Hull-House in the Family and in the Stars

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.

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.

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The Otherworldly Orbit of Jane Addams

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.

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 19th 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.

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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.

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Jane Addams’ Pragmatist Theories of Democracy and Education

This is a guest post, written by Parysa Mostajir, a Teaching Fellow in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. She is currently researching the role of experience in diverse human practices like science, art, and democracy, and setting up an academic blog, Woman is a Rational Animal, dedicated to diversifying syllabi in the history of ideas.

 

Jane Addams is deservedly well-known for her tireless activism, having spent her life engaged in efforts to improve her society: She served on the boards of national and international organizations like the International Association for Labor Legislation, she campaigned for the rights of women, children, and workers, and she offered educational, recreational, and organizational resources to the immigrant communities surrounding Hull House. Although she spent most of her time in the world of action rather than the world of ideas, fewer people (including philosophers) give Jane Addams due credit for her role in developing a philosophical movement called ‘pragmatism.’

John Dewey (Wikimedia Commons)

Jane Addams was admired by some of the most celebrated pragmatist philosophers of her time, including John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and William James. The correspondence of these professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, show that they recognized Addams as an imposing intellect from whom they had much to learn. In a 1908 letter on the Jane Addams Paper Project Digital Edition, George Herbert Mead describes “how deep an impression” Addams’ speech on ‘War and Progress’ made on him and others in the audience. In a 1902 letter, William James describes Addams’ Democracy and Social Ethics as “one of the great books of our time” and claims he “learned a lot” from it. Dewey’s correspondence reveals years of extensive visits and engagements with Hull House, during which he exchanged ideas with Jane Addams, the latter of whom he described as “the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual & moral faith I ever saw” [1894.10.10 (00206): John Dewey to Alice Chipman Dewey]. He even attributed to Addams the first definite statement of the pragmatist thesis “that democracy means certain types of experience,—an interest in experience in its various forms and types” [Volume 1: Political Philosophy, Logic, Ethics p. 2379].

Jane Addams with Hull House children (ca. 1930)

So what is pragmatism, and how does Jane Addams’ work fit in? Pragmatism is a tradition of philosophy that began in the United States in the late 19th century and was characterized by several core beliefs to do with action and experience. Addams’ major contributions to the tradition of pragmatism were her theories of democracy and education, which contained substantial developments on these core principles of pragmatist philosophy. Pragmatists believed that knowledge and theories should be based on our practical experiences, and be constructed in such a way as to take our practical experiences into account. Most striking about Addams’ writings in philosophy is the extent to which she adhered to the pragmatist conviction that knowledge and theories should be consistent with practice. While other pragmatists were involved in practical applications of their theories, such as John Dewey’s founding of the Laboratory School in Chicago, none of them were quite so embedded in everyday society as Jane Addams was at Hull House. Addams’ theories were derived from her practical activities at Hull House, instead of becoming lost in philosophical speculation. It was appropriate and inevitable, she wrote, that her experiences at Hull House would affect her convictions (Twenty Years, p. 308).

Pragmatists believed not only that theories should be derived from practical experiences, but that they should be applied to practical experiences in attempts to improve, enrich, and make sense of our lives. Unlike many contemporary philosophers who engaged in highly abstract theories having no relationship to the everyday world, pragmatists believed that theories gained their value by serving as instruments for empowering us to successfully take action in the world—this is the practical aspect of ‘pragmatism,’ from which the tradition derives its name. As a pragmatist, Jane Addams therefore rejected the idea, popular among sociologists of her time, that settlements like Hull House were ‘laboratories’ from which to derive pure theory (Deegan 1988, pp. 34-5; Twenty Years, p. 308). She wrote that her energies were directed “not towards sociological investigation, but to constructive work” (Hull House Maps and Papers, pp. vii-viii). Her pragmatist goal was to use the knowledge she gained from her experiences at Hull House in the application of practical changes and improvements to society and the lives of the people she served, not to derive knowledge for its own sake or out of pure curiosity.

These core pragmatist convictions concerning knowledge, practice, and experience are evident in Addams’ theories of democracy and education. To begin with her theory of democracy, Addams did not believe that democracy was a matter of ticking a ballot box once every few years. In her celebrated book on Democracy and Social Ethics, she argued that democracy was not just “a sentiment” or “a creed,” but “a rule of living,” which needed to be integrated practically with people’s everyday lives (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 6). Many failures of contemporary democracy, she claimed, could be linked to the isolation of different sectors of society from each other, preventing familiarity with each other’s experiences. In order to resolve them and make our democracy more robust, we needed to ensure the connectedness of diverse types of people who shared the same society. For that reason, democracy could not be compartmentalized as a handful of remote political institutions, with the citizens’ democratic participation reduced to a single act of casting a vote. Democracy had to be an active practice for all citizens, embedded in their lived experience as a way of life. This would only be achieved by “mixing” the diverse members of society together and giving them “a wider acquaintance with and participation in the life about them” (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 5). Addams argued that it was through exposure to the different ways of life, struggles, and needs of the many people with whom we share our society that we can develop attitudes of sympathy, respect, and a democratic sense of moral obligation towards each other. For example, she mentioned the importance of newspaper and literature in giving people the chance “to know all kinds of life” (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 8). This kind of “diversified human experience and resultant sympathy” were, for Addams, “the foundation and guarantee of Democracy” (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 7).

Jane Addams described her views of the Pullman Strike in her 1912 article, A Modern Lear.”

As a true pragmatist, concerned with the connection between theory and action, Addams based her theory of democracy on what she encountered in her practical experiences, and applied her theory of democracy to suggest resolutions to the problems she encountered. For example, Addams was involved in mediating the 1894 Pullman Strike in Chicago, in which the workers of a large factory went on strike to demand better wages. What Jane Addams saw in this conflict was a failure of the democratic practice of connecting with the experiences of others. Pullman, the owner of the factory, had built a town for the use of his factory employees, with parks and recreational facilities, believing that he was acting generously. The factory workers, on the other hand, resented the extension of Pullman’s control into the private lives. When the workers went on strike, Pullman was confused by their anger, and he felt that the factory workers were being ungrateful for the resources he had given them. In her philosophical work, Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams wrote that the “good deeds” Pullman thought he was conducting were in fact incomplete, because they were not conducted democratically. By not “calling upon the workmen either for self-expression or self-government,” he ended up lacking any familiarity with the experiences and desires of the workers (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 143-4), and had operated undemocratically in making his decisions. “To attempt to attain a social morality,” Addams wrote, “without a basis of democratic experience results in the loss of the only possible corrective and guide” for actions—the daily experiences of other human beings (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 176).

Addams’ theory of education was also deeply pragmatist in its commitment to connecting educational experiences to the practices and experiences of the individuals being educated. At that time, it was common for people to assume that manual laborers had no need of general education. When education was sometimes offered as part of universities’ charitable efforts—for example, University Extension Programs which sent professors to give general courses to the working class on topics like evolution, astronomy, psychology (Twenty Years, Chapter XVIII), or philanthropists who supported children in receiving clerical education—the idea was that such education either gave laborers a temporary mental escape from the mundanity of their work, or gave them the opportunity to leave their lives as factory workers and enter into more respected professions. Such educators did not consider education as having any possible genuine connection to the ordinary lives of factory workers.

Hull House class on immigration, held at the Coffee House, 1920s (Wallace Kirkland, Jane Addams Memorial Collection, University of Illinois at Chicago)

Addams, unsurprisingly, rejected these assumptions. Her pragmatist theory of education was based on extensive practical experience providing educational resources to the working-class neighborhood surrounding Hull House. In Democracy and Social Ethics, she insisted that factory workers could, and should, be provided with education on topics like history and economics which directly connected to their everyday practical experiences. Because of the division of labor, industrial workers spent most of their waking life operating machinery and manufacturing products to which they had no connection. They had no opportunities to understand the history of the invention and development of the machines they operated; they did not know the uses to which the products were put; and they did not understand the sales and distribution aspects of the businesses they worked for. Addams argued that this contributed to the poor quality of life of industrial laborers, and that education in how they fit into the workings of society would help to improve and enrich their daily experiences of manual labor. If educators, the state, and business owners were to take the value of their employees seriously, they needed to provide them with opportunities to connect their own experiences with the wider social, economic, and historical processes of which their manual labor was an important part. Such education would allow workers to make sense of the significance, purpose, and utility of their work, and would positively alter their sense of self, and their estimation of their own worth. In this way, education could be used not as an escape (either as temporary mental relief from monotony, or as an opportunity to move into a different line of work), but as a way of connecting to the ordinary lives of factory workers in such a way as to improve, enrich, and make sense of their everyday practical experience.

Jane Addams, ca. 1910

Amidst her extensive social, political, and community work, Addams found time to write several books threaded with innovative philosophical ideas and play a key role in establishing the new, pragmatist philosophical tradition in the United States—a tradition which was characterized by its beliefs in the importance of connecting knowledge with action, enriching individual experience, and solving social problems. Because Addams had so much experience taking action in the world, her philosophical writings are, more than any other pragmatist, threaded with connections to social, political, and economic problems, and filled with practical suggestions for how to ameliorate those problems. She remains one of the greatest examples of how our philosophical ideas can impact the practical approach we take to politics, economics, and culture, and how politics, economics, and culture can influence the development of ideas. In a time like ours, when universities are highly specialized and losing touch with the needs of wider society, we can look to Addams as a model public philosopher, who put her theories into action and let her real-life experiences guide her theories.

References:

Addams, Jane. Democracy and Social Ethics. New York, London: The Macmillan Company, 1907.

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years At Hull-house: With Autobiographical Notes. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911.

Deegan, Mary Jo. Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988.

Dewey, John. Lectures, Volume 1: Political Philosophy, Logic, Ethics. Ed. Koch, Donald F., and The Center for Dewey Studies, 2016.