If the early American Settlements stood for a more exigent
standard in philanthropic activities, insisting that each new
undertaking should be preceded by carefully ascertained facts,
then certainly Hull-House held to this standard in the opening of
our new coffee-house first started as a public kitchen. An
investigation of the sweatshops had disclosed the fact, that
sewing women during the busy season paid little attention to the
feeding of their families, for it was only by working steadily
through the long day that the scanty pay of five, seven, or nine
cents for finishing a dozen pairs of trousers could be made into
a day's wage; and they bought from the nearest grocery the canned
goods that could be most quickly heated, or gave a few pennies to
the children with which they might secure a lunch from a
neighboring candy shop.
One of the residents made an investigation, at the instance of
the United States Department of Agriculture, into the food values
of the dietaries of the various immigrants, and this was followed
by an investigation made by another resident, for the United
States Department of Labor, into the foods of the Italian colony,
on the supposition that the constant use of imported products
bore a distinct relation to the cost of living. I recall an
Italian who, coming into Hull-House one day as we were sitting at
the dinner table, expressed great surprise that Americans ate a
variety of food, because he believed that they partook only of
potatoes and beer. A little inquiry showed that this conclusion
was drawn from the fact that he lived next to an Irish saloon and
had never seen anything but potatoes going in and beer coming
out.
At that time the New England kitchen was comparatively new in
Boston, and Mrs. Richards, who was largely responsible for its
foundation, hoped that cheaper cuts of meat and simpler
vegetables, if they were subjected to slow and thorough processes
of cooking, might be made attractive and their nutritive value
secured for the people who so sadly needed more nutritious food.
It was felt that this could be best accomplished in public
kitchens, where the advantage of scientific training and careful
supervision could be secured. One of the residents went to
Boston for a training under Mrs. Richards, and when the
Hull-House kitchen was fitted under her guidance and direction,
our hopes ran high for some modification of the food of the
neighborhood. We did not reckon, however, with the wide diversity
in nationality and inherited tastes, and while we sold a certain
amount of the carefully prepared soups and stews in the neigh-
boring factories--a sale which has steadily increased throughout
the years--and were also patronized by a few households, perhaps
the neighborhood estimate was best summed up by the woman who
frankly confessed, that the food was certainly nutritious, but
that she didn't like to eat what was nutritious, that she liked
to eat "what she'd ruther."
If the dietetics were appreciated but slowly, the social value of
the coffee-house and the gymnasium, which were in the same
building, were quickly demonstrated. At that time the saloon
halls were the only places in the neighborhood where the immigrant
could hold his social gatherings, and where he could celebrate
such innocent and legitimate occasions as weddings and christenings.
These halls were rented very cheaply with the understanding that
various sums of money should be "passed across the bar," and it
was considered a mean host or guest who failed to live up to this
implied bargain. The consequence was that many a reputable party
ended with a certain amount of disorder, due solely to the fact
that the social instinct was traded upon and used as a basis for
money making by an adroit host. From the beginning the young
people's clubs had asked for dancing, and nothing was more
popular than the increased space for parties offered by the
gymnasium, with the chance to serve refreshments in the room
below. We tried experiments with every known "soft drink," from
those extracted from an expensive soda water fountain to slender
glasses of grape juice, but so far as drinks were concerned we
never became a rival to the saloon, nor indeed did anyone imagine
that we were trying to do so. I remember one man who looked
about the cozy little room and said, "This would be a nice place
to sit in all day if one could only have beer." But the
coffee-house gradually performed a mission of its own and became
something of a social center to the neighborhood as well as a
real convenience. Business men from the adjacent factories and
school teachers from the nearest public schools, used it
increasingly. The Hull-House students and club members supped
together in little groups or held their reunions and social
banquets, as, to a certain extent, did organizations from all
parts of the town. The experience of the coffee-house taught us
not to hold to preconceived ideas of what the neighborhood ought
to have, but to keep ourselves in readiness to modify and adapt
our undertakings as we discovered those things which the
neighborhood was ready to accept.
Better food was doubtless needed, but more attractive and safer
places for social gatherings were also needed, and the
neighborhood was ready for one and not for the other. We had no
hint then in Chicago of the small parks which were to be
established fifteen years later, containing the halls for dancing
and their own restaurants in buildings where the natural desire
of the young for gayety and social organization, could be safely
indulged. Yet even in that early day a member of the Hull-House
Men's Club who had been appointed superintendent of Douglas Park
had secured there the first public swimming pool, and his fellow
club members were proud of the achievement.
There was in the earliest undertakings at Hull-House a touch of
the artist's enthusiasm when he translates his inner vision
through his chosen material into outward form. Keenly conscious
of the social confusion all about us and the hard economic
struggle, we at times believed that the very struggle itself
might become a source of strength. The devotion of the mothers
to their children, the dread of the men lest they fail to provide
for the family dependent upon their daily exertions, at moments
seemed to us the secret stores of strength from which society is
fed, the invisible array of passion and feeling which are the
surest protectors of the world. We fatuously hoped that we might
pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common
destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract
from life's very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should
be effective against them.
Of course there was always present the harrowing consciousness of
the difference in economic condition between ourselves and our
neighbors. Even if we had gone to live in the most wretched
tenement, there would have always been an essential difference
between them and ourselves, for we should have had a sense of
security in regard to illness and old age and the lack of these
two securities are the specters which most persistently haunt the
poor. Could we, in spite of this, make their individual efforts
more effective through organization and possibly complement them
by small efforts of our own?
Some such vague hope was in our minds when we started the
Hull-House Cooperative Coal Association, which led a vigorous
life for three years, and developed a large membership under the
skillful advice of its one paid officer, an English workingman
who had had experience in cooperative societies at "'ome." Some
of the meetings of the association, in which people met to
consider together their basic dependence upon fire and warmth,
had a curious challenge of life about them. Because the
cooperators knew what it meant to bring forth children in the
midst of privation and to see the tiny creatures struggle for
life, their recitals cut a cross section, as it were, in that
world-old effort--the "dying to live" which so inevitably
triumphs over poverty and suffering. And yet their very
familiarity with hardship may have been responsible for that
sentiment which traditionally ruins business, for a vote of the
cooperators that the basket buyers be given one basket free out
of every six, that the presentation of five purchase tickets
should entitle the holders to a profit in coal instead of stock
"because it would be a shame to keep them waiting for the
dividend," was always pointed to by the conservative
quarter-of-a-ton buyers as the beginning of the end. At any
rate, at the close of the third winter, although the Association
occupied an imposing coal yard on the southeast corner of the
Hull-House block and its gross receipts were between three and
four hundred dollars a day, it became evident that the concern
could not remain solvent if it continued its philanthropic
policy, and the experiment was terminated by the cooperators
taking up their stock in the remaining coal.
Our next cooperative experiment was much more successful, perhaps
because it was much more spontaneous.
At a meeting of working girls held at Hull-House during a strike
in a large shoe factory, the discussions made it clear that the
strikers who had been most easily frightened, and therefore first
to capitulate, were naturally those girls who were paying board
and were afraid of being put out if they fell too far behind.
After a recital of a case of peculiar hardship one of them
exclaimed: "Wouldn't it be fine if we had a boarding club of our
own, and then we could stand by each other in a time like this?"
After that events moved quickly. We read aloud together Beatrice
Potter's little book on "Cooperation," and discussed all the
difficulties and fascinations of such an undertaking, and on the
first of May, 1891, two comfortable apartments near Hull-House
were rented and furnished. The Settlement was responsible for
the furniture and paid the first month's rent, but beyond that
the members managed the club themselves. The undertaking
"marched," as the French say, from the very first, and always on
its own feet. Although there were difficulties, none of them
proved insurmountable, which was a matter for great satisfaction
in the face of a statement made by the head of the United States
Department of Labor, who, on a visit to the club when it was but
two years old, said that his department had investigated many
cooperative undertakings, and that none founded and managed by
women had ever succeeded. At the end of the third year the club
occupied all of the six apartments which the original building
contained, and numbered fifty members.
It was in connection with our efforts to secure a building for the
Jane Club, that we first found ourselves in the dilemma between
the needs of our neighbors and the kind-hearted response upon
which we had already come to rely for their relief. The adapted
apartments in which the Jane Club was housed were inevitably more
or less uncomfortable, and we felt that the success of the club
justified the erection of a building for its sole use.
Up to that time, our history had been as the minor peace of the
early Church. We had had the most generous interpretation of our
efforts. Of course, many people were indifferent to the idea of
the Settlement; others looked on with tolerant and sometimes
cynical amusement which we would often encounter in a good story
related at our expense; but all this was remote and unreal to us,
and we were sure that if the critics could but touch "the life of
the people," they would understand.
The situation changed markedly after the Pullman strike, and our
efforts to secure factory legislation later brought upon us a
certain amount of distrust and suspicion; until then we had been
considered merely a kindly philanthropic undertaking whose new
form gave us a certain idealistic glamour. But sterner tests
were coming, and one of the first was in connection with the new
building for the Jane Club. A trustee of Hull-House came to see
us one day with the good news that a friend of his was ready to
give twenty thousand dollars with which to build the desired new
clubhouse. When, however, he divulged the name of his generous
friend, it proved to be that of a man who was notorious for
underpaying the girls in his establishment and concerning whom
there were even darker stories. It seemed clearly impossible to
erect a clubhouse for working girls with such money and we at
once said that we must decline the offer. The trustee of
Hull-House was put in the most embarrassing situation; he had, of
course, induced the man to give the money and had had no thought
but that it would be eagerly received; he would now be obliged to
return with the astonishing, not to say insulting, news that the
money was considered unfit.
In the long discussion which followed, it gradually became clear
to all of us that such a refusal could be valuable only as it
might reveal to the man himself and to others, public opinion in
regard to certain methods of money-making, but that from the very
nature of the case our refusal of this money could not be made
public because a representative of Hull-House had asked for it.
However, the basic fact remained that we could not accept the
money, and of this the trustee himself was fully convinced. This
incident occurred during a period of much discussion concerning
"tainted money" and is perhaps typical of the difficulty of
dealing with it. It is impossible to know how far we may blame
the individual for doing that which all of his competitors and
his associates consider legitimate; at the same time, social
changes can only be inaugurated by those who feel the
unrighteousness of contemporary conditions, and the expression of
their scruples may be the one opportunity for pushing forward
moral tests into that dubious area wherein wealth is accumulated.
In the course of time a new clubhouse was built by an old friend of
Hull-House much interested in working girls, and this has been
occupied for twelve years by the very successful cooperating Jane
Club. The incident of the early refusal is associated in my mind
with a long talk upon the subject of questionable money I held with
the warden of Toynbee Hall, whom I visited at Bristol where he was
then canon in the Cathedral. By way of illustration he showed me a
beautiful little church which had been built by the last
slave-trading merchant in Bristol, who had been much disapproved of
by his fellow townsmen and had hoped by this transmutation of
ill-gotten money into exquisite Gothic architecture to reconcile
himself both to God and man. His impulse to build may have been
born from his own scruples or from the quickened consciences of his
neighbors who saw that the world-old iniquity of enslaving men must
at length come to an end. The Abolitionists may have regarded this
beautiful building as the fruit of a contrite heart, or they may
have scorned it as an attempt to magnify the goodness of a slave
trader and thus perplex the doubting citizens of Bristol in regard
to the entire moral issue.
Canon Barnett did not pronounce judgment on the Bristol merchant.
He was, however, quite clear upon the point that a higher moral
standard for industrial life must be embodied in legislation as
rapidly as possible, that it may bear equally upon all, and that
an individual endeavoring to secure this legislation must forbear
harsh judgment. This was doubtless a sound position, but during
all the period of hot discussion concerning tainted money I never
felt clear enough on the general principle involved, to accept the
many invitations to write and speak upon the subject, although I
received much instruction in the many letters of disapproval sent
to me by radicals of various schools because I was a member of the
university extension staff of the then new University of Chicago,
the righteousness of whose foundation they challenged.
A little incident of this time illustrated to me the confusion in
the minds of a least many older men between religious teaching
and advancing morality. One morning I received a letter from the
head of a Settlement in New York expressing his perplexity over
the fact that his board of trustees had asked money from a man
notorious for his unscrupulous business methods. My
correspondent had placed his resignation in the hands of his
board, that they might accept it at any time when they felt his
utterances on the subject of tainted money were offensive, for he
wished to be free to openly discuss a subject of such grave moral
import. The very morning when my mind was full of the questions
raised by this letter, I received a call from the daughter of the
same business man whom my friend considered so unscrupulous. She
was passing through Chicago and came to ask me to give her some
arguments which she might later use with her father to confute
the charge that Settlements were irreligious. She said, "You
see, he has been asked to give money to our Settlement and would
like to do it, if his conscience was only clear; he disapproves
of Settlements because they give no religious instruction; he has
always been a very devout man."
I remember later discussing the incident with Washington Gladden
who was able to parallel it from his own experience. Now that
this discussion upon tainted money has subsided, it is easy to
view it with a certain detachment impossible at the moment, and
it is even difficult to understand why the feeling should have
been so intense, although it doubtless registered genuine moral
concern.
There was room for discouragement in the many unsuccessful
experiments in cooperation which were carried on in Chicago
during the early nineties; a carpenter shop on Van Buren Street
near Halsted, a labor exchange started by the unemployed, not so
paradoxical an arrangement as it seems, and a very ambitious plan
for a country colony which was finally carried out at Ruskin,
Tennessee. In spite of failures, cooperative schemes went on,
some of the same men appearing in one after another with
irrepressible optimism. I remember during a cooperative
congress, which met at Hull-House in the World's Fair summer that
Mr. Henry D. Lloyd, who collected records of cooperative
experiments with the enthusiasm with which other men collect
coins or pictures, put before the congress some of the remarkable
successes in Ireland and North England, which he later embodied
in his book on "Copartnership." One of the old-time cooperators
denounced the modern method as "too much like cut-throat
business" and declared himself in favor of "principles which may
have failed over and over again, but are nevertheless as sound as
the law of gravitation." Mr. Lloyd and I agreed that the fiery
old man presented as fine a spectacle of devotion to a lost cause
as either of us had ever seen, although we both possessed
memories well stored with such romantic attachments.
And yet this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in
competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is
coming to pass all over the face of the earth. Five years later
in the same Hull-House hall in which the cooperative congress was
held, an Italian senator told a large audience of his fellow
countrymen of the successful system of cooperative banks in north
Italy and of their cooperative methods of selling produce to the
value of millions of francs annually; still later Sir Horace
Plunkett related the remarkable successes in cooperation in
Ireland.
I have seldom been more infected by enthusiasm than I once was in
Dulwich at a meeting of English cooperators where I was fairly
overwhelmed by the fervor underlying the businesslike proceedings
of the congress, and certainly when I served as a juror in the
Paris Exposition of 1900, nothing in the entire display in the
department of Social Economy was so imposing as the building
housing the exhibit, which had been erected by cooperative
trades-unions without the assistance of a single contractor.
And so one's faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a
realized ideal of better human relations. At least traces of
successful cooperation are found even in individualistic America.
I recall my enthusiasm on the day when I set forth to lecture at
New Harmony, Indiana, for I had early been thrilled by the tale
of Robert Owen, as every young person must be who is interested
in social reform; I was delighted to find so much of his spirit
still clinging to the little town which had long ago held one of
his ardent experiments, although the poor old cooperators, who
for many years claimed friendship at Hull-House because they
heard that we "had once tried a cooperative coal association,"
might well have convinced me of the persistency of the
cooperative ideal.
Many experiences in those early years, although vivid, seemed to
contain no illumination; nevertheless they doubtless permanently
affected our judgments concerning what is called crime and vice.
I recall a series of striking episodes on the day when I took the
wife and child, as well as the old godfather, of an Italian
convict to visit him in the State Penitentiary. When we
approached the prison, the sight of its heavy stone walls and
armed sentries threw the godfather into a paroxysm of rage; he
cast his hat upon the ground and stamped upon it, tore his hair,
and loudly fulminated in weird Italian oaths, until one of the
guards, seeing his strange actions, came to inquire if "the
gentleman was having a fit." When we finally saw the convict, his
wife, to my extreme distress, talked of nothing but his striped
clothing, until the poor man wept with chagrin. Upon our return
journey to Chicago, the little son aged eight presented me with
two oranges, so affectionately and gayly that I was filled with
reflections upon the advantage of each generation making a fresh
start, when the train boy, finding the stolen fruit in my lap,
violently threatened to arrest the child. But stranger than any
episode was the fact itself that neither the convict, his wife,
nor his godfather for a moment considered him a criminal. He had
merely gotten excited over cards and had stabbed his adversary
with a knife. "Why should a man who took his luck badly be kept
forever from the sun?" was their reiterated inquiry.
I recall our perplexity over the first girls who had "gone
astray"--the poor, little, forlorn objects, fifteen and sixteen
years old, with their moral natures apparently untouched and
unawakened; one of them whom the police had found in a
professional house and asked us to shelter for a few days until
she could be used as a witness, was clutching a battered doll
which she had kept with her during her six months of an "evil
life." Two of these prematurely aged children came to us one day
directly from the maternity ward of the Cook County hospital,
each with a baby in her arms, asking for protection, because they
did not want to go home for fear of "being licked." For them were
no jewels nor idle living such as the storybooks portrayed. The
first of the older women whom I knew came to Hull-House to ask
that her young sister, who was about to arrive from Germany,
might live near us; she wished to find her respectable work and
wanted her to have the "decent pleasures" that Hull-House
afforded. After the arrangement had been completed and I had in
a measure recovered from my astonishment at the businesslike way
in which she spoke of her own life, I ventured to ask her
history. In a very few words she told me that she had come from
Germany as a music teacher to an American family. At the end of
two years, in order to avoid a scandal involving the head of the
house, she had come to Chicago where her child was born, but when
the remittances ceased after its death, finding herself without
home and resources, she had gradually become involved in her
present mode of life. By dint of utilizing her family
solicitude, we finally induced her to move into decent lodgings
before her sister arrived, and for a difficult year she supported
herself by her exquisite embroidery. At the end of that time,
she gave up the struggle, the more easily as her young sister,
well established in the dressmaking department of a large shop,
had begun to suspect her past life.
But discouraging as these and other similar efforts often were,
nevertheless the difficulties were infinitely less in those days
when we dealt with "fallen girls" than in the years following
when the "white slave traffic" became gradually established and
when agonized parents, as well as the victims themselves, were
totally unable to account for the situation. In the light of
recent disclosures, it seems as if we were unaccountably dull not
to have seen what was happening, especially to the Jewish girls
among whom "the home trade of the white slave traffic" was first
carried on and who were thus made to break through countless
generations of chastity. We early encountered the difficulties
of that old problem of restoring the woman, or even the child,
into the society she has once outraged. I well remember our
perplexity when we attempted to help two girls straight from a
Virginia tobacco factory, who had been decoyed into a
disreputable house when innocently seeking a lodging on the late
evening of their arrival. Although they had been rescued
promptly, the stigma remained, and we found it impossible to
permit them to join any of the social clubs connected with
Hull-House, not so much because there was danger of
contamination, as because the parents of the club members would
have resented their presence most hotly. One of our trustees
succeeded in persuading a repentant girl, fourteen years old,
whom we tried to give a fresh start in another part of the city,
to attend a Sunday School class of a large Chicago church. The
trustee hoped that the contact with nice girls, as well as the
moral training, would help the poor child on her hard road. But
unfortunately tales of her shortcomings reached the
superintendent who felt obliged, in order to protect the other
girls, to forbid her the school. She came back to tell us about
it, defiant as well as discouraged, and had it not been for the
experience with our own clubs, we could easily have joined her
indignation over a church which "acted as if its Sunday School
was a show window for candy kids."
In spite of poignant experiences or, perhaps, because of them,
the memory of the first years at Hull-House is more or less
blurred with fatigue, for we could of course become accustomed
only gradually to the unending activity and to the confusion of a
house constantly filling and refilling with groups of people.
The little children who came to the kindergarten in the morning
were followed by the afternoon clubs of older children, and those
in turn made way for the educational and social organizations of
adults, occupying every room in the house every evening. All
one's habits of living had to be readjusted, and any student's
tendency to sit with a book by the fire was of necessity
definitely abandoned.
To thus renounce "the luxury of personal preference" was,
however, a mere trifle compared to our perplexity over the
problems of an industrial neighborhood situated in an unorganized
city. Life pressed hard in many directions and yet it has always
seemed to me rather interesting that when we were so distressed
over its stern aspects and so impressed with the lack of
municipal regulations, the first building erected for Hull-House
should have been designed for an art gallery, for although it
contained a reading-room on the first floor and a studio above,
the largest space on the second floor was carefully designed and
lighted for art exhibits, which had to do only with the
cultivation of that which appealed to the powers of enjoyment as
over against a wage-earning capacity. It was also significant
that a Chicago business man, fond of pictures himself, responded
to this first appeal of the new and certainly puzzling
undertaking called a Settlement.
The situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that at the time
the building was erected in 1891, our free lease of the land upon
which Hull-House stood expired in 1895. The donor of the building,
however, overcame the difficulty by simply calling his gift a
donation of a thousand dollars a year. This restriction of course
necessitated the simplest sort of a structure, although I remember
on the exciting day when the new building was promised to us, that
I looked up my European notebook which contained the record of my
experience in Ulm, hoping that I might find a description of what I
then thought "a Cathedral of Humanity" ought to be. The
description was "low and widespreading as to include all men in
fellowship and mutual responsibility even as the older pinnacles
and spires indicated communion with God." The description did not
prove of value as an architectural motive I am afraid, although the
architects, who have remained our friends through all the years,
performed marvels with a combination of complicated demands and
little money. At the moment when I read this girlish outbreak it
gave me much comfort, for in those days in addition to our other
perplexities Hull-House was often called irreligious.
These first buildings were very precious to us and it afforded us
the greatest pride and pleasure as one building after another was
added to the Hull-House group. They clothed in brick and mortar
and made visible to the world that which we were trying to do;
they stated to Chicago that education and recreation ought to be
extended to the immigrants. The boys came in great numbers to
our provisional gymnasium fitted up in a former saloon, and it
seemed to us quite as natural that a Chicago man, fond of
athletics, should erect a building for them, as that the boys
should clamor for more room.
I do not wish to give a false impression, for we were often
bitterly pressed for money and worried by the prospect of unpaid
bills, and we gave up one golden scheme after another because we
could not afford it; we cooked the meals and kept the books and
washed the windows without a thought of hardship if we thereby
saved money for the consummation of some ardently desired
undertaking.
But in spite of our financial stringency, I always believed that
money would be given when we had once clearly reduced the
Settlement idea to the actual deed. This chapter, therefore,
would be incomplete if it did not record a certain theory of
nonresistance or rather universal good will which I had worked
out in connection with the Settlement idea and which was later so
often and so rudely disturbed. At that time I had come to
believe that if the activities of Hull-House were ever
misunderstood, it would be either because there was not time to
fully explain or because our motives had become mixed, for I was
convinced that disinterested action was like truth or beauty in
its lucidity and power of appeal.
But more gratifying than any understanding or response from
without could possibly be, was the consciousness that a growing
group of residents was gathering at Hull-House, held together in
that soundest of all social bonds, the companionship of mutual
interests. These residents came primarily because they were
genuinely interested in the social situation and believed that
the Settlement was valuable as a method of approach to it. A
house in which the men residents lived was opened across the
street, and at the end of the first five years the Hull-House
residential force numbered fifteen, a majority of whom still
remain identified with the Settlement.
Even in those early years we caught glimpses of the fact that
certain social sentiments, which are "the difficult and
cumulating product of human growth" and which like all higher
aims live only by communion and fellowship, are cultivated most
easily in the fostering soil of a community life.
Occasionally I obscurely felt as if a demand were being made upon
us for a ritual which should express and carry forward the hope
of the social movement. I was constantly bewildered by the
number of requests I received to officiate at funeral services
and by the curious confessions made to me by total strangers.
For a time I accepted the former and on one awful occasion
furnished "the poetic part" of a wedding ceremony really
performed by a justice of the peace, but I soon learned to
steadfastly refuse such offices, although I saw that for many
people without church affiliations the vague humanitarianism the
Settlement represented was the nearest approach they could find
to an expression of their religious sentiments.
These hints of what the Settlement might mean to at least a few
spirits among its contemporaries became clear to me for the first
time one summer's day in rural England, when I discussed with John
Trevor his attempts to found a labor church and his desire to turn
the toil and danger attached to the life of the workingman into
the means of a universal fellowship. That very year a papyrus
leaf brought to the British Museum from Egypt, containing among
other sayings of Jesus, "Raise the stone, and there thou shalt
find me; cleave the wood and I am there," was a powerful reminder
to all England of the basic relations between daily labor and
Christian teaching.
In those early years at Hull-House we were, however, in no danger
of losing ourselves in mazes of speculation or mysticism, and there
was shrewd penetration in a compliment I received from one of our
Scotch neighbors. He came down Polk Street as I was standing near
the foundations of our new gymnasium, and in response to his
friendly remark that "Hull-House was spreading out," I replied that
"Perhaps we were spreading out too fast." "Oh, no," he rejoined,
"you can afford to spread out wide, you are so well planted in the
mud," giving the compliment, however, a practical turn, as he
glanced at the deep mire on the then unpaved street. It was this
same condition of Polk Street which had caused the crown prince of
Belgium when he was brought upon a visit to Hull-House to shake his
head and meditatively remark, "There is not such a street--no, not
one--in all the territory of Belgium."
At the end of five years the residents of Hull-House published
some first found facts and our reflections thereon in a book
called "Hull-House Maps and Papers." The maps were taken from
information collected by one of the residents for the United
States Bureau of Labor in the investigation into "the slums of
great cities" and the papers treated of various neighborhood
matters with candor and genuine concern if not with skill. The
first edition became exhausted in two years, and apparently the
Boston publisher did not consider the book worthy of a second.