The post is drawn from a presentation by Rima Lunin Schultz at the Urban History Association Sixth Biennial Conference, October 25-28, 2012.
“Very early in its history the [Hull-House Women’s ] club,” Jane Addams tells us, “formed what was called ‘A Social Extension Committee.’ Once a month this committee [gave]parties to people in the neighborhood who for any reason seem[ed] forlorn and without much social pleasure. One evening they invited only Italian women, thereby crossing a distinct social ‘gulf,’ for there certainly exists as great a sense of social difference between the prosperous Irish-American women and the South-Italian peasants as between any two sets of people in the city of Chicago.”[1] As the tale continues, Addams relates how the Italian women “all stayed home and sent their husbands” and the Social Extension Committee was forced to relate to the Italian men. Addams is pleased to recount how, at the end of the evening, “one of the [Irish-American women of the Social Extension] committee said to [her], ‘Do you know I am ashamed of the way I have always talked about ‘dagos,’ they are quite like other people, only one must take a little more pains with them. I have been nagging my husband to move off M Street because they are moving in, but I am going to try staying awhile and see if I can make a real acquaintance with some of them.’”[2]
Addams then tells her readers, “To my mind at that moment the speaker had passed from the region of the uncultivated person into the possibilities of the cultivated person. The former is bounded by a narrow outlook on life, unable to overcome differences of dress and habit, and his interests are slowly contracting within a circumscribed area; while the latter constantly tends to be more a citizen of the world because of his growing understanding of all kinds of people with their varying experiences.”[3] But there is another side to the social exchange. In her story, Addams ends with this final sentence: “The evening finally developed into a very successful party, not so much because the committee were equal to it, as because the Italian men rose to the occasion.” This interaction and many thousands more made possible because of the opportunities afforded by a cosmopolitan city, Addams argues, are producing a new social ethic sorely needed in the divided and conflicted world of industrial America.
What is specific to Addams’s definition of cosmopolitanism, however, is that it has a moral component; it is not solely appreciation of and respect for, the cultural traditions and identities of people of different backgrounds, or even to accept spatial proximity among people who are different from ourselves. It is the acceptance of a social responsibility across these cultural differences. As historian Wendy Sarvasy interprets it, “Addams was proposing a positive embracing of social interdependence that required breaking with a disembodied, individualistic approach to cosmopolitanism.”[4]
Let’s look again at Addams’s anecdote. The great divide between the local clubwoman and the Italian men was not just linguistic and cultural, but perhaps more significantly, the class difference between women from a locally-based shopkeeper-tradesman property-owning class who are contemplating moving to a more prosperous, up-and-coming neighborhood, and men and women who were part of the immigrant laboring classes, unskilled, renters, often seasonally unemployed, whose wives and children work.
What is the meaning of the statement by Addams that the Social Extension Committee “[gave]parties to people in the neighborhood who for any reason seem[ed] forlorn and without much social pleasure”? This is a curious phrase. It describes the event between two groups as purely neighborly. This was not “charity” or a lecture on how to become an American, or what to feed the babies. To be sure, such lectures and functions did happen in the context of the settlement’s work. Here neighborhood people of one group were aided by the structure of the settlement’s women’s club to “get to know their new neighbors.” It was an effort to socialize democracy, and, as this paper will show, the Irish American women of the Hull-House Women’s Club (HHWC) were, in turn, “socialized” by the members of the downtown Chicago Woman’s Club (CWC). Both sets of groups were made better citizens as a result of these exchanges: the Irish Americans and the Italian men; the HHWC and the CWC.
It is in this context that Addams’s statements about the Italian men and Italian families makes sense. Addams frequently talked about the neighborhood’s Italian immigrant families and was very sympathetic to their plight and strong in her defense of their family values. At the same time she characterized the Italian family as having “no social life in any structural form, and can supply none to the child.” Only the public school or the social settlement like Hull-House had the potential to connect the family “with the organized society about them.”[5] Addams is expressing a sociological concept that she has been developing from her college days, that became clear to her when she abandoned what she perceived were outmoded codes of charitable and civic behavior. She would accuse Americans who pursue private family lives without connection to a larger sense of community and civic responsibility as being without a social life that had structural form. She might have said the same thing about rural American born whites.
Democratic cosmopolitanism was the prerequisite condition in which this socialization could occur. The public schools, the vanguard institution of the progressive movement, are, for Addams, an example of government not fearful of extending its function. This, too, is evidence of how democratic cosmopolitanism can be the engine for fostering a new social morality. The schools are decidedly cosmopolitan and can become democratic. So wedded to the notion that social progress in immigrant neighborhoods was directly related to public school attendance, Hull-House residents included immigrants’ American-born children (under the age of ten)who attended parochial schools in the category “immigrant” on the famous nationality maps published in 1895.[6] One of the first community projects undertaken by the Hull-House Women’s Club was to identify the potential school population in the neighborhood and demand that adequate space be made available by implementing new school construction. The clubwomen were displaying the “nascent social morality”[7] that Addams believed gave evidence of the possibility of human progress at home and abroad.
Hull-House settlement, acting as a “parastate” organization, attempted to create a quasi-public space akin to the schools.[8] When the Italian men attended the social hour at Hull-House, the process of “socialization” began; it was a multifaceted process, in the best sense of the opportunities of democratic cosmopolitanism; the upwardly mobile Irish American club member was both a participant and a recipient of socialization. The clubwomen and their guests were displaying the “nascent social morality”[9] that Addams believed gave evidence of the possibility of human progress at home and abroad.
To make Addams’s project of socializing democracy even more concrete, we need to return to the Hull-House Women’s Club (HHWC)to dig for evidence of what Addams had in mind when she postulated new models for social relations adapted to the new needs of industrialism. The Club was a favorite “pet” project of Addams.[10] Started in 1891, by 1905, when Bowen Hall, the building constructed just for club activities opened, the membership approached one thousand.[11] Modeled on the Chicago Woman’s Club (CWC), Addams solicited help from Hull-House residents and CWC leaders to launch the neighborhood project. Hull-House residents Mary E. McDowell, Alzina Parsons Stevens, and Laura Dainty Pelham all served as presidents of the HHWC. So did wealthy Hull-House benefactor and clubwoman Louise de Koven Bowen, who had an official affiliation with HHWC for seventeen years. Ellen Henrotin, first President of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and a key figure in Chicago’s progressive women’s political culture, was an honorary member of HHWC, as was Mrs. Daniel Burnham of Evanston.[12]
This infrastructure of women’s clubs was so significant in municipal politics in the Progressive era that journalists covered club news regularly, including neighborhood clubs. Well-connected HHWC was able to leverage this publicity and influence in its efforts to improve the alleys and streets of the Nineteenth Ward. Although Alderman Johnny Powers remained undefeated in a series of Hull-House led challenges, there were some gains in local self-government and these were obtained through the organized activities of the HHWC. So formidable were the HHWC foot soldiers in their quest for improved sanitation, new school construction, neighborhood playgrounds, and housing reform that supporters of the ward boss established their own women’s club, a temporary campaign novelty, however.[13]
State civil service reform supported by organized women was a competing system that, if expanded could undermine Johnny Powers’ base. Hull-House resident Amanda Johnson was a civil service appointee and so were other local women who began to fill out a new bureaucracy that was of skilled, meritorious workers, presumably dedicated to a whole set of different values and not beholden to the party bossism.
Powers, although busy with giving away streetcar franchises, thought it important to attack Amanda Johnson; this provoked the Hull-House residents to respond with a new campaign in 1898 against Powers. Johnson had been Jane Addams’ deputy garbage inspector for the Nineteenth Ward, and in 1896 when the position of garbage inspector became a civil service job, she took the examination and passed at the top of the list. Johnson, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, and a protégé of Richard T. Ely, had succeeded Jane Addams as garbage inspector for the 19th ward in 1896. She came to Hull-House from the Kingsley settlement in Pittsburgh. She was indefatigable in her efforts in the neighborhood and when she was temporarily removed to another ward, daily complaints poured into the office of the Board of Health and more than one delegation called at the City Hall to ask for her return, which was ultimately granted.
With Johnson’s civil service appointment and her growing popularity with women in the ward who were gratified with the changes in cleanliness, it appeared that Johnny Powers had permanently lost a job for one of his heelers. Early in January 1898, however, Powers demanded that the Civil Service Commission discharge Johnson from her post because she had been actively campaigning against him and finding fault with his record as alderman. The newspapers as well as the commission found Johnson innocent, but Powers, as chairman of the finance committee of the City Council, decided that it was necessary to cut expenses. By merging the Bureau of Streets and Alley Cleaning with the Department of Streets, he deprived Amanda Johnson of her job.
Four hundred people protested Powers’ attack on Johnson meeting in the Hull-House gymnasium. Florence Kelley, who knew how to agitate for reform, characterized this community response as a “wholly spontaneous action on the part of neighbors who had never before taken any initiative” and she suggested it might “serve as an indication of the social effect of five years of patient effort on the spot for sanitary improvement.” Things had improved so substantially that the mere threat of a relapse into the old state of things called forth spontaneous protests.”[14]
William Hill, of the University of Chicago, who earlier had moved into Hull-House so he could vote in the Nineteenth Ward, headed up a campaign committee to run a candidate against Powers.[15] Addams kicked off the campaign with an address to the Chicago Ethical Culture Society on Sunday, January 23, 1898. The speech received national attention; it attacked Powers and his methods masterfully.[16]
How much did gender play in this whole thing? Amanda Johnson behaved differently than the men who had gone up against Johnny Powers; all of them were bought off eventually, or, if not, were men whose base of operations was independent of municipal office holding. Only Amanda Johnson, who had her job through Civil Service, and who had no chance of ever being appointed thru the traditional political patronage system, was independent enough to function outside of Powers. She was part of the emerging women’s dominion that historian Robyn Muncy describes on the federal level.
Amanda Johnson had advocated the abolition of the contract system. She argued that direct employment of labor by the city in accordance with the civil service law, would mean much in the securing of improvements.[17] Addams told the Chicago Tribune, “The system of letting the street and alley cleaning to contractors is a bad one. The inspectors are lax. They do not enforce the ordinances, perhaps out of friendship for the contractor. The system of special assessments is too hard on the poor people. Street improvement should be paid for out of a common tax levy.”[18] This was radical talk, moving municipal government out of the dark ages of privatized control by property owners.[19]
When Alderman Powers went after Inspector Amanda Johnson’s civil service job he was responding to something larger than his loss of a single patronage position; he was reacting against a new source of power and authority that women’s expertise and organization seemed on the verge of achieving.[20] This was a real achievement that in part can be attributed to Addams’s “empowerment” of the local women of the HHWC. The way in which this empowerment occurred was important. The forces at work included a newly socialized group of local neighborhood women. They had found their “voices,” so to speak. They were encouraged and inspired and pulled outside the narrow domestic concerns when they saw their lives through this new lens provided by the settlement house’s interpretation of the events around them. The settlement house, conversely, forged alliances with privileged clubwomen socializing them into also thinking differently about social conditions and, as well, having a new appreciation for neighborhood working-class women and immigrants.
How does the HHWC figure in Addams’s democratic cosmopolitanism? As Addams tells the story, the Irish American club member had been contemplating moving out of the neighborhood because immigrants were getting closer to her street. Addams’s idea about neighborhood change was expressed this way: “When a given neighborhood becomes shabby, or filled with foreigners, whose habits are unlike those of their neighbors, the best people in the neighborhood begin to move out, taking with them their initiative and natural leadership, as their parents had previously taken it from their native villages. A settlement deliberately selects such a neighborhood, and moves into it, but must not lay too much stress upon that fact in and of itself. Its social relations are successful as it touches to life the dreary and isolated, and brings them into a fuller participation of common inheritance. Its teaching is successful as it makes easy and available that which was difficult and remote. Its most valuable function as yet, lies along the line of interpretation and synthesis.”[21] While the Irish in the neighborhood were not in the same position as the newer immigrants, they suffered from its devaluation, its crime, its lack of proper city services, and the feeling of failure because they had to stay. Addams organizes them so they can understand what is happening and, perhaps, have a role in improving the neighborhood through political action. Suffrage activism is crucial here.
The new activism of local women was a result to a large extent of the success that Addams had in bringing them into fuller participation with city and, theoretically, national and world events. One reason why visitors and journalists wanted to know “Who were the HHWC members?” might have been because they were no longer operating in the stereotypical ways working-class and immigrant women were regularly portrayed.
“So those women live in this district?” asked a visitor to the HHWC.
“Yes, they are our neighbors,” one of the residents . . . answered.[22]
Perhaps this is an apocryphal story, or one encouraged by the settlement house to publicize the grass roots support the residents had energized for their projects. The settlement had to prove to the outside world that the neighborhood had accepted them and that the settlement idea was working. Clearly it was a form of damage control, because the same article in the Chicago Tribune featured a detailed description of the notable, wealthy women who were also attending the club meeting.
As Addams’s explanation of neighborhood change indicates, democratic cosmopolitanism was an ideal to work toward. The Hull-House Settlement, at Polk and Halsted streets, was positioned between the crowded and insanitary alleys and streets of the “port of entry” section of Chicago, the area close to the railroad depot, near the least desirable residential streets where African Americans clustered close to dens of prostitution. It was in this section of the Near West Side, east of Hull-House, where the thirty or so streets made famous by the carefully coded multicolored maps showing nationality and wages that Hull-House residents had compiled, were located.[23] Neither the settlement house itself or the residential streets to the west are mapped on any of the Nationalities maps. But it was in these streets where most of the club members lived.
Hull-House settlement was actually at the edge of one of the largest Irish American neighborhoods in the United States[24] and the majority of the women who joined the Hull-House Women’s Club (HHWC) were Irish American; others were German American, or just plain American. “We have a changing neighborhood,” wrote a longtime Hull-House supporter and personal friend of Addams, “when I first began to go to it [1894-95], it was all Irish; then it changed to Italian, then to Greek; now it is the Mexicans and the colored people who are coming in.”[25]
It was fortunate for Jane Addams that in her search for an Italian immigrant quarter she happened upon Halsted and Polk streets. Her work with the east side neighbors required the energy and determination of the west side Irish. Ironically, one of the many former tenants of Charles Hull’s old house prior to Addams and Starr’s rental, were Irish Catholic nuns who had run an old age home for Irish indigents from the neighborhood. Without the English speaking Irish Americans and other old settlers in the neighborhood democratic cosmopolitanism did not have a chance. The work of the HHWC would not have been possible. They had some time to do club work because they were not factory or sweat-shop workers, although the ranks of working women were filled with Irish and Irish Americans.[26] These particular women had achieved sufficient social mobility to begin to enter into civic life; had time to attend the afternoon meetings of the club and to monitor the city’s garbage collectors in their alleys, count the number of seats in the neighborhood public schools, visit poor and immigrant families on the other side of the busy, commercial and industrial street[27] and “show Italians how to keep their garbage boxes clean.“[28]
Improving the neighborhood and re-claiming the geographic space as sanitary, respectable, perhaps even middle-class, was a great undertaking and trumped worrying about offending the sensibilities of Italian peasants. The bigger battle was authorizing neighborhood women to take on civic work. In the beginning, “many thought the work not ladylike,” Addams said. “Curiously enough, it was all right for a woman to go into a house and care for cases of diphtheria that had resulted from garbage, but it was not ladylike to remove the garbage and thus prevent the diphtheria.”[29]
What Addams understood in the first twenty years at Hull-House was that working people like the respectable Irish in the neighborhood and the immigrants needed lots of help in becoming active citizens. This help, which ought to have come primarily from an activist government willing and able to take on the proper responsibility of legislating wise laws that realistically protected newcomers from exploitation, in the imperfect world of American municipal politics and a recalcitrant national government, fell to entities such as settlements. By trial and error Addams learned how to craft roles for the various groups in the neighborhood. Hull-House resident Julia C. Lathrop, who made a study of the charity institutions in Cook County, realized that “the club’s existence in the east end of the Nineteenth Ward” was itself an extraordinary achievement. Such an occurrence would have been considered an absurd idea by many who saw the neighborhood in decline. Lathrop reasoned that its realization was possible only because of “the effort and common meeting ground of the settlement.”[30] The achievement was evidence for Addams, and for the broader reform community to which she offered interpretation and political advice, that working-class Americans and local shopkeepers and tradesmen and their families were able to overcome prejudices and old habits to interact with and even aid the immigrants who moved close to them.
There is a another way of understanding the social geography of the HHWC. In the context of the changing neighborhood of the Near West Side, the club had prestige and status, and it provided opportunities for leadership of the local women who, already better off than the immigrants, were approaching middle-class status, although these experiences had to be mediated by the structures and personnel of the Hull-House settlement. But to be successful, both as a project of socialization and as a political effort to change municipal government, it was also necessary to connect to a larger universe of women’s clubs: almost all the settlement houses had women’s clubs modeled on the HHWC. They belonged to county, state, and national federations. This infrastructure invited cross-class, interracial, inter-ethnic, and interreligious exchanges that mirrored the cosmopolitan values encouraged by Addams. Yet these interactions were not without problems. “Every once in a while,” said Mrs. Anna Brundage, of HHWC, “the exclusive clubs get up meetings and invite us, but they are careful not to mix up the settlement clubs with exclusive clubs. The members of those exclusive clubs sometimes talk about what they can do for the poor women of the settlements. Well, I have heard more than one clubwoman say they could learn something from us if they came down here.”[31] Issues of class intersect with the larger ideal Addams projected for democratic cosmopolitanism and may, in some cases, have been more divisive than ethnic diversity. If Anna Brundage found the give-and-take with wealthy clubwomen difficult it remains to be seen how the uneducated, foreign-speaking neighborhood women could assert their citizenship. These difficulties are revealed in the belated formation of the Italian and Greek women’s clubs at Hull-House decades after the HHWC had been a key factor in settlement and neighborhood life.
Addams’s anecdote about the HHWC points to the association’s hospitality and bridge-building functions in the neighborhood. Just as the settlement itself was located at the intersection of a “port of entry” quarter and a neighborhood of well-established Irish-Americans whose religious and educational institutional structures were well-established, the HHWC was able to draw new immigrants in to the capacious Bowen Hall for Christmas celebrations and other quasi-public events. This then became the space where the ideal of democratic cosmopolitanism could be implemented. Keeping this contrived cosmopolitan community intact even within Hull-House space was an on-going process. It needed both parts of the equation: the Irish American clubwomen and the Italian men. So strong was the hold Addams and other leading figures at the settlement had with the original members of the HHWC, that many of them kept their affiliation even as, “growing prosperous [they] gradually moved to all parts of the city.”[32] This meant that the club became even more a gathered-in rather than a natural community.
Other changes were occurring in the neighborhoods of Chicago: instead of internationalism, ethnic groups’ identification with nationalist claims in their countries of origin had taken root and many of the mutual aid societies took on the added task of raising money for the nationalist efforts of their compatriots in the homeland.[33] In Chicago, for example, this was dramatically apparent in the Greek community near Hull-House. “The European war was already dividing our immigrant neighbors from each other,” Addams writes. Speaking for herself and the Hull-House residents, she explained that “We could not imagine asking ourselves whether the parents of a child who needed help were Italians, and therefore on the side of the Allies, or Dalmatians, and therefore on the side of the Central Powers. Such a question was as remote as if during the Balkan war [1912-13] we had anxiously inquired whether the parents were Macedonians or Montenegrins although at one time that distinction had been of paramount importance to many of our neighbors.”[34] This is a candid acknowledgement that there were different points of view among the neighbors and the Hull-House residents. Addams highlighted the potential internationalism of the transnational connections in the neighborhoods but downplayed the potential conflicts.
It was much harder to develop the kind of self-governing clubs like the HHWC among the immigrant women from the Italian, Greek, and later, the Mexican communities. Addams’s approach to the Italian community, for example, was as complicated as the social, economic, and cultural differences within the Italian colonies.[35] One possibility was to have interested women from these communities join the HHWC. But that did not seem to be an option, at least it has been difficult to find evidence of this change-over in HHWC membership, even though Addams had considerable knowledge of immigrant women’s organizations in Chicago’s neighborhoods, and it is possible might have been able to draw on these connections as she had the downtown clubwomen earlier.[36]
When African Americans and Mexicans began to arrive in significant numbers they also followed the same pattern as the HHWC and organized themselves into separate national clubs. If we understand that the HHWC was organized at the time when the neighborhood was largely Irish and American stock, it is no surprise that membership reflected this reality. What is surprising in the context of democratic cosmopolitan ideals is that there was not more effort to break this pattern.
What democratic cosmopolitanism meant in the Hull-House case was that a self-governing group of American-born neighborhood women, albeit assisted rather substantially by educated, well-to-do clubwomen, learned to appreciate the immigrants who were moving close by, and, instead of viewing them as threats, they saw them as good human beings who deserved respect, fair treatment, and hospitality. This was a significant accomplishment on the part of Jane Addams and the Hull-House settlement.
Is it fair to say that the failure or limitation of the HHWC was that it could not, in like manner to the downtown clubs, be “midwife” to the Italians and Mexicans and Greeks in developing women’s organizations in those communities? More investigation into the 1920s and 1930s is required to get at this issue. At any rate, the result was that for almost two decades after the settlement opened only one woman’s club, the HHWC, flourished. In 1910, finally, another woman’s club was established: fifty Greek women started an organization that met monthly at Hull-House to discuss cases of need in the Greek community. Emma E. Neukom was the catalyst for the club. As so many other “brokers” who bridged the space between the settlement and the ethnic community, Neukom was educated and involved in community work professionally. [37] A decade later, in 1921, the Greek Women’s Club and the Italian Women’s Club at the settlement reported memberships of only twenty and thirty respectively. Perhaps the war years had dampened the enthusiasm of the neighborhood for such endeavors.[38]
While the developments at Hull-House with two other groups, the Mexicans who arrived as early as 1916, and the African Americans, who move into the neighborhood in the mid to late 1920s, are very important in any consideration of democratic cosmopolitanism, they fall into the post World War I period and are beyond the scope of this paper. In both cases the non-European nature of the traditional cultures of these two groups made their integration into social settlements difficult. Mexican migrations to Chicago coincided with national cultural developments and revolution in Mexico and Jane Addams and Hull-House had a cause and a cultural movement, indeed a civilizational model with which to work. Thus activities at the settlement were built around these cultural motifs. The Hull-House Kilns are part of this development.[39]
In the first twenty years there were few African Americans living in the Hull-House neighborhood.[40] Only after World War I did that change. Addams takes a gendered approach to the challenges that the arrival of African Americans in the neighborhood present. It would be instructive to get at the differences and similarities in the relationships that Addams and the settlement had in the 1890s with the HHWC and the kind of support that is given to the African American women in the 1920s and 1930s. Initially, Addams responded by interfacing with the organized Colored Women’s Clubs in Northern Illinois and Chicago. Addams had a long record of support of the aspirations of African American clubwomen. She met with African American clubwomen in the south around the turn of the century and brought the wrath of a Jim Crow world upon her head when she broke bread and ate with her southern black club sisters.[41] In 1902 she stood with the “colored” women’s clubs in their unsuccessful fight to be allowed to participate as equals in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.[42] In Cook County she was always on the side of efforts to find opportunities where colored and white women’s clubs could send representatives and sit together on councils as equals. In an increasingly segregated, racist America, she had worked between the lines to break down barriers. This is surely the background for the outreach that the African American women’s organizations made to Addams and Hull-House in 1924-25. As the neighborhood changed from having relatively few African American residents to one in which blacks became a distinct group along with the Mexicans and the Italians, the black clubwomen naturally appealed to Addams for support in establishing a women’s club that would be the vanguard in the socialization work in the neighborhood. The Hull-House Community Club (HHCC) was up and running in 1925 and remained an all-black club well into the 1940s. The HHCC had a relatively small membership; its work with other neighborhood African American community groups was not unlike the kinds of outreach that had been done by the HHWC in its first years.[43]
I have not found evidence that Jane Addams ever expressed discomfort or even frustration with the club system that allowed groups to self-segregate. I do not think that this sort of language would have occurred to her since she did not think that cosmopolitanism canceled out identification with nationalism. The new kind of patriotism that she spoke about had to do with being able to be both a nationalist and a cosmopolitan. Addams did not advocate giving up cultural traditions of the group; she even contemplated dual citizenship laws as an answer to the problem of patriotism as a more honest and reasonable solution.
There were always clubs at Hull-House that were composed of “mixed” nationalities; from the beginning, as well, there was a structure in place where clubs sent delegates to a self-governing council.[44] In this way there were opportunities for breaking down barriers and dispelling antagonisms and prejudices. On the other hand, socialization may have occurred “top down” rather than “bottom up.” Since we have few documents from the club meetings, it is difficult to assess how far the process of self-governance had taken hold. In the great mansion that was Hull-House, there were many rooms and many different entrances. By the 1930s, “Everyone their own Hull-House” might be an apt description of the concrete expression of democratic cosmopolitanism.
Addams used her knowledge of the neighborhood to advance her political agenda. It was not the kind of party politics agenda one thinks about when discussing the ambitions of candidates or party operatives; except for her participation in the Progressive Party of 1912, Addams did her work outside of the party system, hoping to influence it, and advocating legislative initiatives. Yet her activism had a political purpose of major dimension. Along with other reformers of her day who saw the need to redefine the function of government in a democracy, Addams needed to dismantle the authority of the party system and the status quo. One of the major stumbling blocks facing Addams and other reformers was the hostility to and fear of immigrants. The crisis of labor and the failures of municipal government were often blamed on the un-assimilated foreigners who had “invaded” our shores. In the 1900s anarchists were rounded up in Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods and there were deportation raids on aliens accused of being radicals. Addams understood the importance of developing public opinion informed by a positive image of urban life, even as she had to effectively describe the terrible conditions in tenements and factories that imperiled immigrants and their families. Democratic cosmopolitanism gave agency to immigrants and humanized them while it pointed to the failures of municipal government to make use of the talents and basic goodness of the newcomers. Addams did see goodness and potential in the neighbors who came to Hull-House. Her ability to project the growth of social ethics in the immigrant community came out of a combination of her experiences understood in the context of social evolutionary theory.
Reading Newer Ideals after many years of research about daily life at Hull-House, it occurred to me that democratic cosmopolitanism embodied her ideal vision for the city and expressed the underlying rationale for Hull-House as an effort to make this ideal real. Hull-House fostered self-government at the local level and it connected the local community to global issues. It was an expression of “think global, act local” at a time when the countervailing forces of Social Darwinist extreme individualism, racism, unregulated capitalism, imperialism, and intolerance were rampant.
[1] Jane Addams, Twenty Years At Hull-House, With Autobiographical Notes. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925, 358.
[2] Ibid., 358-359.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Wendy Sarvasy, “A Global ‘Common table,’ Jane Addams’s Theory of Democratic Cosmopolitanism and World Social Citizenship,” in Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy edited by Marilyn Fischer, Carol Nackenoff, and Wendy Chmielewski (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 189.]
[5] Jane Addams, “Foreign-Born Children in the Primary Grades,” National Educational Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses 36 (1897): 104-12.
[6] Rima Lunin Schultz, “Introduction,” Hull-House Maps and Papers by the Residents of Hull-House (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007, reprint of 1895 edition), 20.
[7] Anne Firor Scott, “Introduction” to the John Harvard Library edition of Democracy and Social Ethics by Jane Addams (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), lxi-lxii.
[8] Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1994), 135.
[9] Anne Firor Scott, “Introduction” to the John Harvard Library edition of Democracy and Social Ethics by Jane Addams (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), lxi-lxii.
[10] Hilda Satt Polacheck I Came a Stranger: The Story of a Hull-House Girl (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 100.
[11] Bowen, Growing Up With A City, 84-85.
[12] “Hull House Woman’s Club Work.” Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1895, pg. 3.
[13] “War On Hull House.” Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1898, pg. 12.
[14] Florence Kelley, “Hull House,” New England Magazine, 18, no. 5 (July 1898), 556-557.
[15] Allen F. Davis, “Jane Addams vs. The Ward Boss,” Journal of Illinois State Historical Society 53 Fall 1960, 258-259.
[16] Jane Addams, “Ethical Survivals,”; a large portion of the address was printed in Outlook, LVIII (April 2, 1898: 879-82, under the title, “Why the Ward Boss Rules”; and much of the same material was incorporated into the chapter on Political Reform in Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902).
[17] “Hope Hall Is Assured.” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 24, 1898, pg. 11.
[18] “Hope Hall Is Assured.” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 24, 1898, pg. 11.
[19] See: Robin Einhorn, Property Rules (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
[20] Allen F. Davis, “Jane Addams vs. The Ward Boss,” Journal of Illinois State Historical Society 53 Fall 1960: 258-59.
[21] Quoted in Irving W. Metcalf, “Religious Intelligence: The Evangelical Alliance Congress.” The Independent, Oct. 26, 1893, 45, 2343; American Periodicals Series Online, pg. 13.
[22] “Hull House Woman’s Club Work.” Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1895, pg. 3.
[23] Hull-House Maps and Papers by the Residents of Hull-House (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007, reprint of 1895 edition), with Introduction by Rima Lunin Schultz.
[24] Ellen Skerrett, “The Irish of Chicago’s Hull-House Neighborhood” in New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora edited by Charles Fanning (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 190-191.
[25] Louise deKoven Bowen, “Letter About Hull House,” in volume 2 of Speeches, Addresses, and Letters of Louise deKoven Bowen, ed. Mary Humphreys (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Edwards Brothers, 1937), II,791.
[26] “Women Discuss ‘New Woman’” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 14, 1895, pg. 7.
[27] HH Bulletin, April 1897, Vol. II, no. 4, pg. 6; Chicago Tribune, October 17, 1895, pg. 3; “Hull House Woman’s Club Work.” Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1895, pg. 3;
[28] “Morning Session of Delegates.” Chicago Tribune, October 17, 1895, pg. 3.
[29] “Jane Addams to Joliet Club.” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1900. pg. 7.
[30] Julia C. Lathrop, “What the Settlement Work Stands For,” National Conference of Charities and Correction Proceedings, ed. Isabel C. Barrows (Boston & London, 1896): 106-10.
[31] “Now For An Alderwoman.” Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1902, pg. 1.
[32] Jane Addams, Second Twenty Years At Hull-House, (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1930), 98-99.
[33] In my study of ethnic women’s clubs in Chicago this phenomenon was clearly at work among the Poles. See: Karen M. Majewski, “Stefania Laudyn,” in Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast, editors, Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 492-494; and Majewski, “Stefania Chmielinska,” in Women Building Chicago, 155-157.
[34] [34] Jane Addams, Peace and Bread In Time of War [1922] in Vol. 3, Jane Addams’s Writings On Peace edited by Marilyn Fischer and Judy D. Whipps (Great Britain: Thoemmes Press), 10.
[35] The Italian community’s interest in the political events of the homeland was encouraged by Hull-House’s hospitality to receptions and lectures such as one held in 1897 which featured a “Father Tonello” who gave two lectures in February: “The Duty of Man,” and “The Italian War for Independence.” Tonello was scheduled to lecture March 18 on “A History of the Struggle for Italian Unity.” Addams and Alexander Mastro Valerio, Hull-House resident, established the Italian Institute of Chicago in 1895 with other reformers, prominent Chicago businessmen and civic leaders, and Archbishop Feehan. Modeled after the Italian Institute of New York, it was basically an immigrant protection agency. But the Italian Catholics in the Hull-House neighborhood had established their own cultural, social, and religious institutions. Kate Prindiville’s essay “Italy in Chicago,” published in the Catholic New World, describes the neighborhood from this perspective. Later on Addams’s, applauding the rationalist Giordano Bruno’s proto-modern science positions and religious rationalism, Addams invited the Giordano Bruno Society to meet at Hull-House. The neighborhood was split over Bruno: some Italians saw him as a great anti-clerical hero; others saw the lionization of this heretic as a slap in the face of traditional Catholicism. Hull-House wavered and finally in 1908 asked the Bruno club to withdraw from Hull-House.
[36] Addams credits herself with chairing a coalition of immigrant women’s clubs to oppose a new city charter which did not include a suffrage plank: “During two long periods of agitation for a new city charter, a representative body of women appealed to the public, to the charter convention, and to the Illinois legislature for this very reasonable provision [municipal franchise for women]. During the campaign when I acted as chairman of the federation of a hundred women’s organizations, nothing impressed me so forcibly as the fact that the response came from bodies of women representing the most varied traditions. We were joined by a church society of hundreds of Lutheran women, because Scandinavian women had exercised the municipal franchise since the seventeenth century and had found American cities strangely conservative; by organizations of working women who had keenly felt the need of the municipal franchise in order to secure for their workshops the most rudimentary sanitation and the consideration which the vote alone obtains for workingmen; by federations of mothers’ meetings, who were interested in clean milk and the extension of kindergartens; by property-owning women, who had been powerless to protest against unjust taxation; by organizations of professional women, of university students and of collegiate alumnae; and by women’s clubs interested in municipal reforms. There was a complete absence of the traditional women’s rights clamor, but much impressive testimony from busy and useful women that they had reached the place where they needed the franchise in order to carry on their own affairs. A striking witness as to the need of the ballot, even for the women who are restricted to the most primitive and traditional activities, occurred when some Russian women waited upon me to ask whether under the new charter, they could vote for covered markets and so get rid of the shocking Chicago grime upon all their food; and when some neighboring Italian women sent me word that they would certainly vote for public washhouses if they ever had the chance to vote at all. It was all so human, so spontaneous and so direct that it really seemed as if the time might be ripe for political expression of that public concern on the part of women which has so long been forced to seek indirection. None of these busy women wished to take the place of men nor to influence them in the direction of men’s affairs, but they did seek an opportunity to cooperate directly in civic life through the use of the ballot in regard to their own affairs.” Jane Addams, Twenty Years At Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925, 339-340.
[37] “Mrs. Emma E. Neukom.” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 3, 1954, pg. 20.
[38] Addams is very clear about the damages done to socialization and social progress locally as a result of WWI: Addams, The Second Twenty Years (New York: Macmillan, 1930).
[39] Cheryl Ganz and Margaret Strobel, editors, Pots of Promise (Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, -get pub. date).
[40] Hilda Satt Polacheck was a member of a literary club at Hull-House, of mixed nationalities, about 1910, and she read Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first time, reviewing it for the club; most of the members knew nothing of African American history and several had never seen an African American. “Dr. James Britton, who was the club leader, told us that most of the Negroes had lived longer in America than any of us present and were fully entitled to anything and everything that the country offered. I thought of all the racial hatreds in Poland, Germany, and Russia, and I was thankful that I was being cured of this disease of intolerance.” Hilda Satt Polacheck, I Came a Stranger. The Story of a Hull-House Girl, edited by Dena J. Polacheck Epstein (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991, 95.
[41] “The Religious World,” [excerpt] Advance (December 21, 1899).
[42] “Colored Women’s Cause,” Los Angeles Express (May 6, 1902), Jane Addams Papers, Clippings file, reel 55-0671, Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago; “Women Vote to Keep Color Line: National Federation of Clubs Also Defends Reorganization Plan by States,” New York Herald (May 7, 1902) Jane Addams Papers, Clippings file, reel 55-0672, Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago.
[43] The subject of race and Jane Addams is too large a topic to take up here in its entirety; she was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a proponent of Franz Boas’ one race theory, a friend and colleague of W.E.B. Du Bois, and often an independent, minority voice speaking out for the inclusion of women of color in federations of women’s clubs on the national, state, and county level. In 1902, for example, her effort to include colored women’s clubs in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs failed. She persistently broke the color line in her trips South; she spoke out against a proposal to institute segregation in the Chicago Public Schools, joining with Ida B. Wells-Barnett in this endeavor. And she spoke out against violence against African Americans that went unprosecuted. In almost every instance, Addams took what we would classify as pro-civil rights positions. African Americans were welcomed at Hull-House, but there is scant information on the early years. Dr. Harriet A. Rice, one of the first African American women physicians, was a Hull-House resident in the 1890s. W.E.B. Du Bois lectured at Hull-House and stayed as a guest with his wife when he was in Chicago. Ida B. Wells Barnett was a frequent guest at Hull-House and lectured there. But the two women disagreed over Addams’s legalistic interpretation of the lynching crisis. The NAACP regularly held meetings and receptions at Hull-House, as did the Chicago and Northern Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. In the summer camp, Bowen Country Club Camp, and away from the complications of turf battles and open hostility to African Americans crossing “boundaries” in the Italian community, Addams and Louise Bowen & staff were able to engineer interracial social interactions from the 1930s on. Those experiences were transformative for some of the Italian neighborhood kids, but once back in the city, Hull-House had trouble controlling the forces of racism as did every other institution in American society.
[44] “The meeting of the Congress of Hull-House Clubs April 15 was attended by fifty-six voting delegates, representing twenty-two of the thirty Hull-House clubs.” HH Bulletin May 1896, vol. I, no. 5. pg. 4. The Congress of Clubs was held in October 1896 and rules were adopted for 1897. 1. Each Social Club is required to have at least one lecture a month, and is restricted to one purely social evening a month. 2. An average attendance of at least fifteen members a week is required, or the club may not be continued. 3, No member is allowed to belong to more than one Social Club. Visitors are only allowed in clubs on the social evenings. 4. Club secretaries are requested to hand a monthly report of the work done in the clubs to Miss Addams by the 29th of the month. Selections will be made from these reports for publication in the Hull-House Bulletin. As a result of the discussion the following lectures and talks have been offered. Suggestions for other subjects will be gratefully received and new lists will be sent to the club secretaries from time to time. Selections should be made a week in advance, and notification given to Miss Addams. Nature stories, Mr. Moore; astronomy, Mr. Le Moyne; Lives of American Writers, Miss Johnson; science talks, Miss Pitkin; Travel talks, Mr. White; Club ideals, Miss Addams, Hygiene, Dr. Moore. Gas bills will be presented to the clubs the first of each month. Club treasurers are requested to pay as promptly as possible.” (HH Bulletin, January 1, 1897, Vol. II, No. 1, pg. 8.) Most, if not all, of the clubs indicated that membership was by application through members already in the clubs. Many of the clubs were also limited in how many total members were allowed. One club, the Friendship Club, of young men and women who met for musical and literary programs, fined members if they did not take part in the program once a month. (HH Bulletin, January 1, 1897, Vol. II, No. 1, pg. 10.) The Gymnasium club was open to members of the gymnasium class; the Liberty Club, a boys’ club reading U.S. history, had its members drawn from the boys’ gymnastic classes. The Henry Clay Club met every Friday evening and debated political and social issues of the day. They also studied the lives of great men and adopted a method of answering to the roll-call by having each member, as his name was called, answer by giving a quotation from some well-known author. (HH Bulletin, January 1, 1897, Vol. II, No. 1, pg. 10.)
The onset of a brutal global war in the summer of 1914 shocked Jane Addams and other American pacifists who were certain their cause was gaining widespread acceptance. “Nobody who was not a mature person…can realize now how remote, how unbelievable, a European war then seemed,” her friend Alice Hamilton later wrote. “Believing as we did then in the slow but sure progress of the human race, we looked forward to nothing worse than sporadic outbursts in such unknown regions as the Balkans or South America, never in the highly civilized countries of the Europe which we knew so well.”
According to Jane Addams in Twenty Years at Hull-House, the first old settlers to attend the first few Old Settlers’ Parties did not favor “foreigners,” blaming immigrants “for a depreciation of property and a general lowering of the tone of the neighborhood.” However, these views would slowly disappear as the night of celebration went on; Addams recalled one guest realizing that the immigrants were “buffeting the waves of a new development,” and that old settlers had also once felt this way, they themselves having been new settlers once. This New Year’s celebration at Hull-House was a way of bringing people together and bridging differences, and celebrating the old and the new, all while saying goodbye to the old year and welcoming the new one. The Old Settlers’ Party, much like any New Year’s party, would always end with everyone singing “Auld Lang Syne.”
