CHAPTER V
FIRST DAYS AT HULL-HOUSE
The next January found Miss Starr and myself in Chicago,
searching for a neighborhood in which we might put our plans into
execution. In our eagerness to win friends for the new
undertaking, we utilized every opportunity to set forth the
meaning of the Settlement as it had been embodied at Toynbee
Hall, although in those days we made no appeal for money, meaning
to start with our own slender resources. From the very first the
plan received courteous attention, and the discussion, while
often skeptical, was always friendly. Professor Swing wrote a
commendatory column in the Evening Journal, and our early
speeches were reported quite out of proportion to their worth. I
recall a spirited evening at the home of Mrs. Wilmarth, which was
attended by that renowned scholar, Thomas Davidson, and by a
young Englishman who was a member of the then new Fabian society
and to whom a peculiar glamour was attached because he had
scoured knives all summer in a camp of high-minded philosophers
in the Adirondacks. Our new little plan met with criticism, not
to say disapproval, from Mr. Davidson, who, as nearly as I can
remember, called it "one of those unnatural attempts to
understand life through cooperative living."
It was in vain we asserted that the collective living was not an
essential part of the plan, that we would always scrupulously pay
our own expenses, and that at any moment we might decide to
scatter through the neighborhood and to live in separate
tenements; he still contended that the fascination for most of
those volunteering residence would lie in the collective living
aspect of the Settlement. His contention was, of course,
essentially sound; there is a constant tendency for the residents
to "lose themselves in the cave of their own companionship," as
the Toynbee Hall phrase goes, but on the other hand, it is
doubtless true that the very companionship, the give and take of
colleagues, is what tends to keep the Settlement normal and in
touch with "the world of things as they are." I am happy to say
that we never resented this nor any other difference of opinion,
and that fifteen years later Professor Davidson handsomely
acknowledged that the advantages of a group far outweighed the
weaknesses he had early pointed out. He was at that later moment
sharing with a group of young men, on the East Side of New York,
his ripest conclusions in philosophy and was much touched by
their intelligent interest and absorbed devotion. I think that
time has also justified our early contention that the mere
foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space,
hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the
large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in
American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for
Chicago. I am not so sure that we succeeded in our endeavors "to
make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic
unity of society and to add the social function to democracy".
But Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the
dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as
the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it
gives a form of expression that has peculiar value.
In our search for a vicinity in which to settle we went about
with the officers of the compulsory education department, with
city missionaries, and with the newspaper reporters whom I recall
as a much older set of men than one ordinarily associates with
that profession, or perhaps I was only sent out with the older
ones on what they must all have considered a quixotic mission.
One Sunday afternoon in the late winter a reporter took me to
visit a so-called anarchist sunday school, several of which were
to be found on the northwest side of the city. The young man in
charge was of the German student type, and his face flushed with
enthusiasm as he led the children singing one of Koerner's poems.
The newspaperman, who did not understand German, asked me what
abominable stuff they were singing, but he seemed dissatisfied
with my translation of the simple words and darkly intimated that
they were "deep ones," and had probably "fooled" me. When I
replied that Koerner was an ardent German poet whose songs
inspired his countrymen to resist the aggressions of Napoleon,
and that his bound poems were found in the most respectable
libraries, he looked at me rather askance and I then and there
had my first intimation that to treat a Chicago man, who is
called an anarchist, as you would treat any other citizen, is to
lay yourself open to deep suspicion.
Another Sunday afternoon in the early spring, on the way to a
Bohemian mission in the carriage of one of its founders, we
passed a fine old house standing well back from the street,
surrounded on three sides by a broad piazza, which was supported
by wooden pillars of exceptionally pure Corinthian design and
proportion. I was so attracted by the house that I set forth to
visit it the very next day, but though I searched for it then and
for several days after, I could not find it, and at length I most
reluctantly gave up the search.
Three weeks later, with the advice of several of the oldest
residents of Chicago, including the ex-mayor of the city, Colonel
Mason, who had from the first been a warm friend to our plans, we
decided upon a location somewhere near the junction of Blue
Island Avenue, Halsted Street, and Harrison Street. I was
surprised and overjoyed on the very first day of our search for
quarters to come upon the hospitable old house, the quest for
which I had so recently abandoned. The house was of course
rented, the lower part of it used for offices and storerooms in
connection with a factory that stood back of it. However, after
some difficulties were overcome, it proved to be possible to
sublet the second floor and what had been a large drawing-room on
the first floor.
The house had passed through many changes since it had been built
in 1856 for the homestead of one of Chicago's pioneer citizens,
Mr. Charles J. Hull, and although battered by its vicissitudes,
was essentially sound. Before it had been occupied by the
factory, it had sheltered a second-hand furniture store, and at
one time the Little Sisters of the Poor had used it for a home
for the aged. It had a half-skeptical reputation for a haunted
attic, so far respected by the tenants living on the second floor
that they always kept a large pitcher full of water on the attic
stairs. Their explanation of this custom was so incoherent that
I was sure it was a survival of the belief that a ghost could not
cross running water, but perhaps that interpretation was only my
eagerness for finding folklore.
The fine old house responded kindly to repairs, its wide hall and
open fireplace always insuring it a gracious aspect. Its
generous owner, Miss Helen Culver, in the following spring gave
us a free leasehold of the entire house. Her kindness has
continued through the years until the group of thirteen
buildings, which at present comprises our equipment, is built
largely upon land which Miss Culver has put at the service of the
Settlement which bears Mr. Hull's name. In those days the house
stood between an undertaking establishment and a saloon. "Knight,
Death and the Devil," the three were called by a Chicago wit, and
yet any mock heroics which might be implied by comparing the
Settlement to a knight quickly dropped away under the genuine
kindness and hearty welcome extended to us by the families living
up and down the street.
We furnished the house as we would have furnished it were it in
another part of the city, with the photographs and other
impedimenta we had collected in Europe, and with a few bits of
family mahogany. While all the new furniture which was bought
was enduring in quality, we were careful to keep it in character
with the fine old residence. Probably no young matron ever placed
her own things in her own house with more pleasure than that with
which we first furnished Hull-House. We believed that the
Settlement may logically bring to its aid all those adjuncts
which the cultivated man regards as good and suggestive of the
best of the life of the past.
On the 18th of September, 1889, Miss Starr and I moved into it,
with Miss Mary Keyser, who began performing the housework, but who
quickly developed into a very important factor in the life of the
vicinity as well as that of the household, and whose death five
years later was most sincerely mourned by hundreds of our neighbors.
In our enthusiasm over "settling," the first night we forgot not
only to lock but to close a side door opening on Polk Street, and
we were much pleased in the morning to find that we possessed a
fine illustration of the honesty and kindliness of our new neighbors.
Our first guest was an interesting young woman who lived in a
neighboring tenement, whose widowed mother aided her in the
support of the family by scrubbing a downtown theater every
night. The mother, of English birth, was well bred and carefully
educated, but was in the midst of that bitter struggle which
awaits so many strangers in American cities who find that their
social position tends to be measured solely by the standards of
living they are able to maintain. Our guest has long since
married the struggling young lawyer to whom she was then engaged,
and he is now leading his profession in an eastern city. She
recalls that month's experience always with a sense of amusement
over the fact that the succession of visitors who came to see the
new Settlement invariably questioned her most minutely concerning
"these people" without once suspecting that they were talking to
one who had been identified with the neighborhood from childhood.
I at least was able to draw a lesson from the incident, and I
never addressed a Chicago audience on the subject of the
Settlement and its vicinity without inviting a neighbor to go
with me, that I might curb any hasty generalization by the
consciousness that I had an auditor who knew the conditions more
intimately than I could hope to do.
Halsted Street has grown so familiar during twenty years of
residence that it is difficult to recall its gradual changes,--the
withdrawal of the more prosperous Irish and Germans, and the slow
substitution of Russian Jews, Italians, and Greeks. A description
of the street such as I gave in those early addresses still stands
in my mind as sympathetic and correct.
Halsted Street is thirty-two miles long, and one of the
great thoroughfares of Chicago; Polk Street crosses it
midway between the stockyards to the south and the
shipbuilding yards on the north branch of the Chicago
River. For the six miles between these two industries the
street is lined with shops of butchers and grocers, with
dingy and gorgeous saloons, and pretentious establishments
for the sale of ready-made clothing. Polk Street, running
west from Halsted Street, grows rapidly more prosperous;
running a mile east to State Street, it grows steadily
worse, and crosses a network of vice on the corners of
Clark Street and Fifth Avenue. Hull-House once stood in
the suburbs, but the city has steadily grown up around it
and its site now has corners on three or four foreign
colonies. Between Halsted Street and the river live about
ten thousand Italians--Neapolitans, Sicilians, and
Calabrians, with an occasional Lombard or Venetian. To
the south on Twelfth Street are many Germans, and side
streets are given over almost entirely to Polish and
Russian Jews. Still farther south, these Jewish colonies
merge into a huge Bohemian colony, so vast that Chicago
ranks as the third Bohemian city in the world. To the
northwest are many Canadian-French, clannish in spite of
their long residence in America, and to the north are
Irish and first-generation Americans. On the streets
directly west and farther north are well-to-do English
speaking families, many of whom own their own houses and
have lived in the neighborhood for years; one man is still
living in his old farmhouse.
The policy of the public authorities of never taking an
initiative, and always waiting to be urged to do their
duty, is obviously fatal in a neighborhood where there is
little initiative among the citizens. The idea underlying
our self- government breaks down in such a ward. The
streets are inexpressibly dirty, the number of schools
inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced, the street
lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking
in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul
beyond description. Hundreds of houses are unconnected
with the street sewer. The older and richer inhabitants
seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they can afford
it. They make room for newly arrived immigrants who are
densely ignorant of civic duties. This substitution of
the older inhabitants is accomplished industrially also,
in the south and east quarters of the ward. The Jews and
Italians do the finishing for the great clothing
manufacturers, formerly done by Americans, Irish, and
Germans, who refused to submit to the extremely low prices
to which the sweating system has reduced their successors.
As the design of the sweating system is the elimination of
rent from the manufacture of clothing, the "outside work"
is begun after the clothing leaves the cutter. An
unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark,
no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional,
no tenement room too small for his workroom, as these
conditions imply low rental. Hence these shops abound in
the worst of the foreign districts where the sweater
easily finds his cheap basement and his home finishers.
The houses of the ward, for the most part wooden, were
originally built for one family and are now occupied by
several. They are after the type of the inconvenient
frame cottages found in the poorer suburbs twenty years
ago. Many of them were built where they now stand; others
were brought thither on rollers, because their previous
sites had been taken by factories. The fewer brick
tenement buildings which are three or four stories high
are comparatively new, and there are few large tenements.
The little wooden houses have a temporary aspect, and for
this reason, perhaps, the tenement-house legislation in
Chicago is totally inadequate. Rear tenements flourish;
many houses have no water supply save the faucet in the
back yard, there are no fire escapes, the garbage and
ashes are placed in wooden boxes which are fastened to the
street pavements. One of the most discouraging features
about the present system of tenement houses is that many
are owned by sordid and ignorant immigrants. The theory
that wealth brings responsibility, that possession entails
at length education and refinement, in these cases fails
utterly. The children of an Italian immigrant owner may
"shine" shoes in the street, and his wife may pick rags
from the street gutter, laboriously sorting them in a
dingy court. Wealth may do something for her
self-complacency and feeling of consequence; it certainly
does nothing for her comfort or her children's improvement
nor for the cleanliness of anyone concerned. Another
thing that prevents better houses in Chicago is the
tentative attitude of the real estate men. Many unsavory
conditions are allowed to continue which would be regarded
with horror if they were considered permanent. Meanwhile,
the wretched conditions persist until at least two
generations of children have been born and reared in them.
In every neighborhood where poorer people live, because
rents are supposed to be cheaper there, is an element
which, although uncertain in the individual, in the
aggregate can be counted upon. It is composed of people
of former education and opportunity who have cherished
ambitions and prospects, but who are caricatures of what
they meant to be--"hollow ghosts which blame the living
men." There are times in many lives when there is a
cessation of energy and loss of power. Men and women of
education and refinement come to live in a cheaper
neighborhood because they lack the ability to make money,
because of ill health, because of an unfortunate marriage,
or for other reasons which do not imply criminality or
stupidity. Among them are those who, in spite of untoward
circumstances, keep up some sort of an intellectual life;
those who are "great for books," as their neighbors say.
To such the Settlement may be a genuine refuge.
In the very first weeks of our residence Miss Starr started a
reading party in George Eliot's "Romola," which was attended by a
group of young women who followed the wonderful tale with
unflagging interest. The weekly reading was held in our little
upstairs dining room, and two members of the club came to dinner
each week, not only that they might be received as guests, but
that they might help us wash the dishes afterwards and so make
the table ready for the stacks of Florentine photographs.
Our "first resident," as she gaily designated herself, was a
charming old lady who gave five consecutive readings from
Hawthorne to a most appreciative audience, interspersing the
magic tales most delightfully with recollections of the elusive
and fascinating author. Years before she had lived at Brook Farm
as a pupil of the Ripleys, and she came to us for ten days
because she wished to live once more in an atmosphere where
"idealism ran high." We thus early found the type of class which
through all the years has remained most popular--a combination of
a social atmosphere with serious study.
Volunteers to the new undertaking came quickly; a charming young
girl conducted a kindergarten in the drawing room, coming
regularly every morning from her home in a distant part of the
North Side of the city. Although a tablet to her memory has
stood upon a mantel shelf in Hull-House for five years, we still
associate her most vividly with the play of little children,
first in her kindergarten and then in her own nursery, which
furnished a veritable illustration of Victor Hugo's definition of
heaven--"a place where parents are always young and children
always little." Her daily presence for the first two years made
it quite impossible for us to become too solemn and
self-conscious in our strenuous routine, for her mirth and
buoyancy were irresistible and her eager desire to share the life
of the neighborhood never failed, although it was often put to a
severe test. One day at luncheon she gaily recited her futile
attempt to impress temperance principles upon the mind of an
Italian mother, to whom she had returned a small daughter of five
sent to the kindergarten "in quite a horrid state of
intoxication" from the wine-soaked bread upon which she had
breakfasted. The mother, with the gentle courtesy of a South
Italian, listened politely to her graphic portrayal of the
untimely end awaiting so immature a wine bibber; but long before
the lecture was finished, quite unconscious of the incongruity,
she hospitably set forth her best wines, and when her baffled
guest refused one after the other, she disappeared, only to
quickly return with a small dark glass of whisky, saying
reassuringly, "See, I have brought you the true American drink."
The recital ended in seriocomic despair, with the rueful
statement that "the impression I probably made on her darkened
mind was, that it was the American custom to breakfast children
on bread soaked in whisky instead of light Italian wine."
That first kindergarten was a constant source of education to us.
We were much surprised to find social distinctions even among its
lambs, although greatly amused with the neat formulation made by
the superior little Italian boy who refused to sit beside uncouth
little Angelina because "we eat our macaroni this way"--imitating
the movement of a fork from a plate to his mouth--"and she eat
her macaroni this way," holding his hand high in the air and
throwing back his head, that his wide-open mouth might receive an
imaginary cascade. Angelina gravely nodded her little head in
approval of this distinction between gentry and peasant. "But
isn't it astonishing that merely table manners are made such a
test all the way along--" was the comment of their democratic
teacher. Another memory which refuses to be associated with
death, which came to her all too soon, is that of the young girl
who organized our first really successful club of boys, holding
their fascinated interest by the old chivalric tales, set forth
so dramatically and vividly that checkers and jackstraws were
abandoned by all the other clubs on Boys' Day, that their members
might form a listening fringe to "The Young Heros."
I met a member of the latter club one day as he flung himself out
of the House in the rage by which an emotional boy hopes to keep
from shedding tears. "There is no use coming here any more,
Prince Roland is dead," he gruffly explained as we passed. We
encouraged the younger boys in tournaments and dramatics of all
sorts, and we somewhat fatuously believed that boys who were
early interested in adventurers or explorers might later want to
know the lives of living statesmen and inventors. It is needless
to add that the boys quickly responded to such a program, and
that the only difficulty lay in finding leaders who were able to
carry it out. This difficulty has been with us through all the
years of growth and development in the Boys' Club until now, with
its five-story building, its splendid equipment of shops, of
recreation and study rooms, that group alone is successful which
commands the services of a resourceful and devoted leader.
The dozens of younger children who from the first came to Hull-
House were organized into groups which were not quite classes and
not quite clubs. The value of these groups consisted almost
entirely in arousing a higher imagination and in giving the
children the opportunity which they could not have in the crowded
schools, for initiative and for independent social relationships.
The public schools then contained little hand work of any sort,
so that naturally any instruction which we provided for the
children took the direction of this supplementary work. But it
required a constant effort that the pressure of poverty itself
should not defeat the educational aim. The Italian girls in the
sewing classes would count the day lost when they could not carry
home a garment, and the insistence that it should be neatly made
seemed a super-refinement to those in dire need of clothing.
As these clubs have been continued during the twenty years they
have developed classes in the many forms of handicraft which the
newer education is so rapidly adapting for the delight of
children; but they still keep their essentially social character
and still minister to that large number of children who leave
school the very week they are fourteen years old, only too eager
to close the schoolroom door forever on a tiresome task that is
at last well over. It seems to us important that these children
shall find themselves permanently attached to a House that offers
them evening clubs and classes with their old companions, that
merges as easily as possible the school life into the working
life and does what it can to find places for the bewildered young
things looking for work. A large proportion of the delinquent
boys brought into the juvenile court in Chicago are the oldest
sons in large families whose wages are needed at home. The
grades from which many of them leave school, as the records show,
are piteously far from the seventh and eighth where the very
first introduction in manual training is given, nor have they
been caught by any other abiding interest.
In spite of these flourishing clubs for children early
established at Hull-House, and the fact that our first organized
undertaking was a kindergarten, we were very insistent that the
Settlement should not be primarily for the children, and that it
was absurd to suppose that grown people would not respond to
opportunities for education and social life. Our enthusiastic
kindergartner herself demonstrated this with an old woman of
ninety who, because she was left alone all day while her daughter
cooked in a restaurant, had formed such a persistent habit of
picking the plaster off the walls that one landlord after another
refused to have her for a tenant. It required but a few week's
time to teach her to make large paper chains, and gradually she
was content to do it all day long, and in the end took quite as
much pleasure in adorning the walls as she had formally taken in
demolishing them. Fortunately the landlord had never heard the
aesthetic principle that exposure of basic construction is more
desirable than gaudy decoration. In course of time it was
discovered that the old woman could speak Gaelic, and when one or
two grave professors came to see her, the neighborhood was filled
with pride that such a wonder lived in their midst. To mitigate
life for a woman of ninety was an unfailing refutation of the
statement that the Settlement was designed for the young.
On our first New Year's Day at Hull-House we invited the older
people in the vicinity, sending a carriage for the most feeble
and announcing to all of them that we were going to organize an
Old Settlers' Party.
Every New Year's Day since, older people in varying numbers have
come together at Hull-House to relate early hardships, and to take
for the moment the place in the community to which their pioneer
life entitles them. Many people who were formerly residents of
the vicinity, but whom prosperity has carried into more desirable
neighborhoods, come back to these meetings and often confess to
each other that they have never since found such kindness as in
early Chicago when all its citizens came together in mutual
enterprises. Many of these pioneers, so like the men and women of
my earliest childhood that I always felt comforted by their
presence in the house, were very much opposed to "foreigners,"
whom they held responsible for a depreciation of property and a
general lowering of the tone of the neighborhood. Sometimes we had
a chance for championship; I recall one old man, fiercely
American, who had reproached me because we had so many "foreign
views" on our walls, to whom I endeavored to set forth our hope
that the pictures might afford a familiar island to the immigrants
in a sea of new and strange impressions. The old settler guest,
taken off his guard, replied, "I see; they feel as we did when we
saw a Yankee notion from Down East,"--thereby formulating the dim
kinship between the pioneer and the immigrant, both "buffeting the
waves of a new development." The older settlers as well as their
children throughout the years have given genuine help to our
various enterprises for neighborhood improvement, and from their
own memories of earlier hardships have made many shrewd
suggestions for alleviating the difficulties of that first sharp
struggle with untoward conditions.
In those early days we were often asked why we had come to live
on Halsted Street when we could afford to live somewhere else. I
remember one man who used to shake his head and say it was "the
strangest thing he had met in his experience," but who was
finally convinced that it was "not strange but natural." In time
it came to seem natural to all of us that the Settlement should
be there. If it is natural to feed the hungry and care for the
sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young,
comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving
for social intercourse that all men feel. Whoever does it is
rewarded by something which, if not gratitude, is at least
spontaneous and vital and lacks that irksome sense of obligation
with which a substantial benefit is too often acknowledged.
In addition to the neighbors who responded to the receptions and
classes, we found those who were too battered and oppressed to
care for them. To these, however, was left that susceptibility
to the bare offices of humanity which raises such offices into a
bond of fellowship.
From the first it seemed understood that we were ready to perform
the humblest neighborhood services. We were asked to wash the
new-born babies, and to prepare the dead for burial, to nurse the
sick, and to "mind the children."
Occasionally these neighborly offices unexpectedly uncovered ugly
human traits. For six weeks after an operation we kept in one of
our three bedrooms a forlorn little baby who, because he was born
with a cleft palate, was most unwelcome even to his mother, and
we were horrified when he died of neglect a week after he was
returned to his home; a little Italian bride of fifteen sought
shelter with us one November evening to escape her husband who
had beaten her every night for a week when he returned home from
work, because she had lost her wedding ring; two of us officiated
quite alone at the birth of an illegitimate child because the
doctor was late in arriving, and none of the honest Irish matrons
would "touch the likes of her"; we ministered at the deathbed of
a young man, who during a long illness of tuberculosis had
received so many bottles of whisky through the mistaken kindness
of his friends, that the cumulative effect produced wild periods
of exultation, in one of which he died.
We were also early impressed with the curious isolation of many
of the immigrants; an Italian woman once expressed her pleasure
in the red roses that she saw at one of our receptions in
surprise that they had been "brought so fresh all the way from
Italy." She would not believe for an instant that they had been
grown in America. She said that she had lived in Chicago for six
years and had never seen any roses, whereas in Italy she had seen
them every summer in great profusion. During all that time, of
course, the woman had lived within ten blocks of a florist's
window; she had not been more than a five-cent car ride away from
the public parks; but she had never dreamed of faring forth for
herself, and no one had taken her. Her conception of America had
been the untidy street in which she lived and had made her long
struggle to adapt herself to American ways.
But in spite of some untoward experiences, we were constantly
impressed with the uniform kindness and courtesy we received.
Perhaps these first days laid the simple human foundations which
are certainly essential for continuous living among the poor;
first, genuine preference for residence in an industrial quarter
to any other part of the city, because it is interesting and
makes the human appeal; and second, the conviction, in the words
of Canon Barnett, that the things that make men alike are finer
and better than the things that keep them apart, and that these
basic likenesses, if they are properly accentuated, easily
transcend the less essential differences of race, language,
creed, and tradition.
Perhaps even in those first days we made a beginning toward that
object which was afterwards stated in our charter: "To provide a
center for higher civic and social life; to institute and
maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to
investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial
districts of Chicago."
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