That neglected and forlorn old age is daily brought to the
attention of a Settlement which undertakes to bear its share of
the neighborhood burden imposed by poverty, was pathetically
clear to us during our first months of residence at Hull-House.
One day a boy of ten led a tottering old lady into the House,
saying that she had slept for six weeks in their kitchen on a bed
made up next to the stove; that she had come when her son died,
although none of them had ever seen her before; but because her
son had "once worked in the same shop with Pa she thought of him
when she had nowhere to go." The little fellow concluded by
saying that our house was so much bigger than theirs that he
thought we would have more roomfor beds. The old woman herself
said absolutely nothing, but looking on with that gripping fear
of the poorhouse in her eyes, she was a living embodiment of that
dread which is so heartbreaking that the occupants of the County
Infirmary themselves seem scarcely less wretched than those who
are making their last stand against it.
This look was almost more than I could bear for only a few days
before some frightened women had bidden me come quickly to the
house of an old German woman, whom two men from the country
agent's office were attempting to remove to the County Infirmary.
The poor old creature had thrown herself bodily upon a small and
battered chest of drawers and clung there, clutching it so firmly
that it would have been impossible to remove her without also
taking the piece of furniture . She did not weep nor moan nor
indeed make any human sound, but between her broken gasps for
breath she squealed shrilly like a frightened animal caught in a
trap. The little group of women and children gathered at her
door stood aghast at this realization of the black dread which
always clouds the lives of the very poor when work is slack, but
which constantly grows more imminent and threatening as old age
approaches. The neighborhood women and I hastened to make all
sorts of promises as to the support of the old woman and the
country officials, only too glad to be rid of their unhappy duty,
left her to our ministrations. This dread of the poorhouse, the
result of centuries of deterrent Poor Law administration, seemed
to me not without some justification one summer when I found
myself perpetually distressed by the unnecessary idleness and
forlornness of the old women in the Cook County Infirmary, many
of whom I had known in the years when activity was still a
necessity, and when they yet felt bustlingly important. To take
away from an old woman whose life has been spent in household
cares all the foolish little belongings to which her affections
cling and to which her very fingers have become accustomed, is to
take away her last incentive to activity, almost to life itself.
To give an old woman only a chair and a bed, to leave her no
cupboard in which her treasures may be stowed, not only that she
may take them out when she desires occupation, but that their
mind may dwell upon them in moments of revery, is to reduce
living almost beyond the limit of human endurance.
The poor creature who clung so desperately to her chest of
drawers was really clinging to the last remnant of normal
living--a symbol of all she was asked to renounce. For several
years after this summer I invited five or six old women to take a
two weeks' vacation from the poorhouse which was eagerly and even
gayly accepted. Almost all the old men in the County Infirmary
wander away each summer taking their chances for finding food or
shelter and return much refreshed by the little "tramp," but the
old women cannot do this unless they have some help from the
outside, and yet the expenditure of a very little money secures
for them the coveted vacation. I found that a few pennies paid
their car fare into town, a dollar a week procured lodging with
an old acquaintance; assured of two good meals a day in the
Hull-House coffee-house they could count upon numerous cups of
tea among old friends to whom they would airily state that they
had "come out for a little change" and hadn't yet made up their
minds about "going in again for the winter." They thus enjoyed a
two weeks' vacation to the top of their bent and returned with
wondrous tales of their adventures, with which they regaled the
other paupers during the long winter.
The reminiscences of these old women, their shrewd comments upon
life, their sense of having reached a point where they may at
last speak freely with nothing to lose because of their
frankness, makes them often the most delightful of companions. I
recall one of my guests, the mother of many scattered children,
whose one bright spot through all the dreary years had been the
wedding feast of her son Mike,--a feast which had become
transformed through long meditation into the nectar and ambrosia
of the very gods. As a farewell fling before she went "in"
again, we dined together upon chicken pie, but it did not taste
like the "the chicken pie at Mike's wedding" and she was
disappointed after all.
Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and
serenity which one would fain associate with old age. I recall
the dying hour of one old Scotchwoman whose long struggle to
"keep respectable" had so embittered her that her last words were
gibes and taunts for those who were trying to minister to her.
"So you came in yourself this morning, did you? You only sent
things yesterday. I guess you knew when the doctor was coming.
Don't try to warm my feet with anything but that old jacket that
I've got there; it belonged to my boy who was drowned at sea nigh
thirty years ago, but it's warmer yet with human feelings than
any of your damned charity hot-water bottles." Suddenly the harsh
gasping voice was stilled in death and I awaited the doctor's
coming shaken and horrified.
The lack of municipal regulation already referred to was, in the
early days of Hull-House, parallelled by the inadequacy of the
charitable efforts of the city and an unfounded optimism that
there was no real poverty among us. Twenty years ago there was no
Charity Organization Society in Chicago and the Visiting Nurse
Association had not yet begun its beneficial work, while the
relief societies, although conscientiously administered, were
inadequate in extent and antiquated in method.
As social reformers gave themselves over to discussion of general
principles, so the poor invariably accused poverty itself of their
destruction. I recall a certain Mrs. Moran, who was returning one
rainy day from the office of the county agent with her arms full of
paper bags containing beans and flour which alone lay between her
children and starvation. Although she had no money she boarded a
street car in order to save her booty from complete destruction by
the rain, and as the burst bags dropped "flour on the ladies'
dresses" and ""beans all over the place," she was sharply
reprimanded by the conductor, who was the further exasperated when
he discovered she had no fare. He put her off, as she had hoped he
would, almost in front of Hull-House. She related to us her state
of mind as she stepped off the car and saw the last of her wares
disappearing; she admitted she forgot the proprieties and "cursed a
little," but, curiously enough, she pronounced her malediction, not
against the rain nor the conductor, nor yet against the worthless
husband who had been set up to the city prison, but, true to the
Chicago spirit of the moment, went to the root of the matter and
roundly "cursed poverty."
This spirit of generalization and lack of organization among the
charitable forces of the city was painfully revealed in that
terrible winter after the World's Fair, when the general
financial depression throughout the country was much intensified
in Chicago by the numbers of unemployed stranded at the close of
the exposition. When the first cold weather came the police
stations and the very corridors of the city hall were crowded by
men who could afford no other lodging. They made huge
demonstrations on the lake front, reminding one of the London
gatherings in Trafalgar Square.
It was the winter in which Mr. Stead wrote his indictment of
Chicago. I can vividly recall his visits to Hull-House, some of
them between eleven and twelve o'clock at night, when he would
come in wet and hungry from an investigation of the levee
district, and while he was drinking hot chocolate before an open
fire, would relate in one of his curious monologues, his
experience as an out-of-door laborer standing in line without an
overcoat for two hours in the sleet, that he might have a chance
to sweep the streets; or his adventures with a crook, who mistook
him for one of this own kind and offered him a place as an agent
for a gambling house, which he promptly accepted. Mr. Stead was
much impressed with the mixed goodness in Chicago, the lack of
rectitude in many high places, the simple kindness of the most
wretched to each other. Before he published "If Christ Came to
Chicago" he made his attempt to rally the diverse moral forces of
the city in a huge mass meeting, which resulted in a temporary
organization, later developing into the Civic Federation. I was
a member of the committee of five appointed to carry out the
suggestions made in this remarkable meeting, and or first concern
was to appoint a committee to deal with the unemployed. But when
has a committee ever dealt satisfactorily with the unemployed?
Relief stations were opened in various part of the city,
temporary lodging houses were established, Hull-House undertaking
to lodge the homeless women who could be received nowhere else;
employment stations were opened giving sewing to the women, and
street sweeping for the men was organized. It was in connection
with the latter that the perplexing question of the danger of
permanently lowering wages at such a crisis, in the praiseworthy
effort to bring speedy relief, was brought home to me. I
insisted that it was better to have the men work half a day for
seventy-five cents than a whole day for a dollar, better that
they should earn three dollars in two days than in three days. I
resigned from the street-cleaning committee in despair of making
the rest of the committee understand that, as our real object was
not street cleaning but the help of the unemployed, we must treat
the situation in such wise that the men would not be worse off
when they returned to their normal occupations. The discussion
opened up situations new to me and carried me far afield in
perhaps the most serious economic reading I have ever done.
A beginning also was then made toward a Bureau of Organized
Charities, the main office being put in charge of a young man
recently come from Boston, who lived at Hull-House. But to
employ scientific methods for the first time at such a moment
involved difficulties, and the most painful episode of the winter
came for me from an attempt on my part to conform to carefully
received instructions. A shipping clerk whom I had known for a
long time had lost his place, as so many people had that year,
and came to the relief station established at Hull-House four or
five times to secure help for his family. I told him one day of
the opportunity for work on the drainage canal and intimated that
if any employment were obtainable, he ought to exhaust that
possibility before asking for help. The man replied that he had
always worked indoors and that he could not endure outside work
in winter. I am grateful to remember that I was too uncertain to
be severe, although I held to my instructions. He did not come
again for relief, but worked for two days digging on the canal,
where he contracted pneumonia and died a week later. I have
never lost trace of the two little children he left behind him,
although I cannot see them without a bitter consciousness that it
was at their expense I learned that life cannot be administered
by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a
man's difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life
and habits as a whole; and that to treat an isolated episode is
almost sure to invite blundering.
It was also during this winter that I became permanently
impressed with the kindness of the poor to each other; the woman
who lives upstairs will willingly share her breakfast with the
family below because she knows they "are hard up"; the man who
boarded with them last winter will give a month's rent because he
knows the father of the family is out of work; the baker across
the street who is fast being pushed to the wall by his downtown
competitors, will send across three loaves of stale bread because
he has seen the children looking longingly into his window and
suspects they are hungry. There are also the families who,
during times of business depression, are obliged to seek help
from the county or some benevolent society, but who are
themselves most anxious not to be confounded with the pauper
class, with whom indeed they do not in the least belong. Charles
Booth, in his brilliant chapter on the unemployed, expresses
regret that the problems of the working class are so often
confounded with the problems of the inefficient and the idle,
that although working people live in the same street with those
in need of charity, to thus confound two problems is to render
the solution of both impossible.
I remember one family in which the father had been out of work
for this same winter, most of the furniture had been pawned, and
as the worn-out shoes could not be replaced the children could
not go to school. The mother was ill and barely able to come for
the supplies and medicines. Two years later she invited me to
supper one Sunday evening in the little home which had been
completely restored, and she gave as a reason for the invitation
that she couldn't bear to have me remember them as they had been
during that one winter, which she insisted had been unique in her
twelve years of married life. She said that it was as if she had
met me, not as I am ordinarily, but as I should appear misshapen
with rheumatism or with a face distorted by neuralgic pain; that
it was not fair to judge poor people that way. She perhaps
unconsciously illustrated the difference between the
relief-station relation to the poor and the Settlement relation
to its neighbors, the latter wishing to know them through all the
varying conditions of life, to stand by when they are in
distress, but by no means to drop intercourse with them when
normal prosperity has returned, enabling the relation to become
more social and free from economic disturbance.
Possibly something of the same effort has to be made within the
Settlement itself to keep its own sense of proportion in regard
to the relation of the crowded city quarter to the rest of the
country. It was in the spring following this terrible winter,
during a journey to meet lecture engagements in California, that
I found myself amazed at the large stretches of open country and
prosperous towns through which we passed day by day, whose
existence I had quite forgotten.
In the latter part of the summer of 1895, I served as a member on
a commission appointed by the mayor of Chicago, to investigate
conditions in the county poorhouse, public attention having
become centered on it through one of those distressing stories,
which exaggerates the wrong in a public institution while at the
same time it reveals conditions which need to be rectified.
However necessary publicity is for securing reformed
administration, however useful such exposures may be for
political purposes, the whole is attended by such a waste of the
most precious human emotions, by such a tearing of living tissue,
that it can scarcely be endured. Every time I entered Hull-House
during the days of the investigation, I would find waiting for me
from twenty to thirty people whose friends and relatives were in
the suspected institution, all in such acute distress of mind
that to see them was to look upon the victims of deliberate
torture. In most cases my visitor would state that it seemed
impossible to put their invalids in any other place, but if these
stories were true, something must be done. Many of the patients
were taken out only to be returned after a few days or weeks to
meet the sullen hostility of their attendants and with their own
attitude changed from confidence to timidity and alarm.
This piteous dependence of the poor upon the good will of public
officials was made clear to us in an early experience with a
peasant woman straight from the fields of Germany, whom we met
during our first six months at Hull-House. Her four years in
America had been spent in patiently carrying water up and down
two flights of stairs, and in washing the heavy flannel suits of
iron foundry workers. For this her pay had averaged thirty-five
cents a day. Three of her daughters had fallen victims to the
vice of the city. The mother was bewildered and distressed, but
understood nothing. We were able to induce the betrayer of one
daughter to marry her; the second, after a tedious lawsuit,
supported his child; with the third we were able to do nothing.
This woman is now living with her family in a little house
seventeen miles from the city. She has made two payments on her
land and is a lesson to all beholders as she pastures her cow up
and down the railroad tracks and makes money from her ten acres.
She did not need charity for she had an immense capacity for hard
work, but she sadly needed the service of the State's attorney
office, enforcing the laws designed for the protection of such
girls as her daughters.
We early found ourselves spending many hours in efforts to secure
support for deserted women, insurance for bewildered widows,
damages for injured operators, furniture from the clutches of the
installment store. The Settlement is valuable as an information
and interpretation bureau. It constantly acts between the
various institutions of the city and the people for whose benefit
these institutions were erected. The hospitals, the county
agencies, and State asylums are often but vague rumors to the
people who need them most. Another function of the Settlement to
its neighborhood resembles that of the big brother whose mere
presence on the playground protects the little one from bullies.
We early learned to know the children of hard-driven mothers who
went out to work all day, sometimes leaving the little things in
the casual care of a neighbor, but often locking them into their
tenement rooms. The first three crippled children we encountered
in the neighborhood had all been injured while their mothers were
at work: one had fallen out of a third-story window, another had
been burned, and the third had a curved spine due to the fact that
for three years he had been tied all day long to the leg of the
kitchen table, only released at noon by his older brother who
hastily ran in from a neighboring factory to share his lunch with
him. When the hot weather came the restless children could not
brook the confinement of the stuffy rooms, and, as it was not
considered safe to leave the doors open because of sneak thieves,
many of the children were locked out. During our first summer an
increasing number of these poor little mites would wander into the
cool hallway of Hull-House. We kept them there and fed them at
noon, in return for which we were sometimes offered a hot penny
which had been held in a tight little fist "ever since mother left
this morning, to buy something to eat with." Out of kindergarten
hours our little guests noisily enjoyed the hospitality of our
bedrooms under the so-called care of any resident who volunteered
to keep an eye on them, but later they were moved into a
neighboring apartment under more systematic supervision.
Hull-House was thus committed to a day nursery which we sustained
for sixteen years first in a little cottage on a side street and
then in a building designed for its use called the Children's
House. It is now carried on by the United Charities of Chicago
in a finely equipped building on our block, where the immigrant
mothers are cared for as well as the children, and where they are
taught the things which will make life in America more possible.
Our early day nursery brought us into natural relations with the
poorest women of the neighborhood, many of whom were bearing the
burden of dissolute and incompetent husbands in addition to the
support of their children. Some of them presented an impressive
manifestation of that miracle of affection which outlives abuse,
neglect, and crime,--the affection which cannot be plucked from
the heart where it has lived, although it may serve only to
torture and torment. "Has your husband come back?" you inquire
of Mrs. S., whom you have known for eight years as an overworked
woman bringing her three delicate children every morning to the
nursery; she is bent under the double burden of earning the money
which supports them and giving them the tender care which alone
keeps them alive. The oldest two children have at last gone to
work, and Mrs. S. has allowed herself the luxury of staying at
home two days a week. And now the worthless husband is back
again--the "gentlemanly gambler" type who, through all
vicissitudes, manages to present a white shirtfront and a gold
watch to the world, but who is dissolute, idle and extravagant.
You dread to think how much his presence will increase the drain
upon the family exchequer, and you know that he stayed away until
he was certain that the children were old enough to earn money
for his luxuries. Mrs. S. does not pretend to take his return
lightly, but she replies in all seriousness and simplicity, "You
know my feeling for him has never changed. You may think me
foolish, but I was always proud of his good looks and educated
appearance. I was lonely and homesick during those eight years
when the children were little and needed so much doctoring, but I
could never bring myself to feel hard toward him, and I used to
pray the good Lord to keep him from harm and bring him back to
us; so, of course, I'm thankful now." She passes on with a
dignity which gives one a new sense of the security of affection.
I recall a similar case of a woman who had supported her three
children for five years, during which time her dissolute husband
constantly demanded money for drink and kept her perpetually
worried and intimidated. One Saturday, before the "blessed
Easter," he came back from a long debauch, ragged and filthy, but
in a state of lachrymose repentance. The poor wife received him
as a returned prodigal, believed that his remorse would prove
lasting, and felt sure that if she and the children went to
church with him on Easter Sunday and he could be induced to take
the pledge before the priest, all their troubles would be ended.
After hours of vigorous effort and the expenditure of all her
savings, he finally sat on the front doorstep the morning of
Easter Sunday, bathed, shaved and arrayed in a fine new suit of
clothes. She left him sitting there in the reluctant spring
sunshine while she finished washing and dressing the children.
When she finally opened the front door with the three shining
children that they might all set forth together, the returned
prodigal had disappeared, and was not seen again until midnight,
when he came back in a glorious state of intoxication from the
proceeds of his pawned clothes and clad once more in the dingiest
attire. She took him in without comment, only to begin again the
wretched cycle. There were of course instances of the criminal
husband as well as of the merely vicious. I recall one woman
who, during seven years, never missed a visiting day at the
penitentiary when she might see her husband, and whose little
children in the nursery proudly reported the messages from father
with no notion that he was in disgrace, so absolutely did they
reflect the gallant spirit of their mother.
While one was filled with admiration for these heroic women,
something was also to be said for some of the husbands, for the
sorry men who, for one reason or another, had failed in the
struggle of life. Sometimes this failure was purely economic and
the men were competent to give the children, whom they were not
able to support, the care and guidance and even education which
were of the highest value. Only a few months ago I met upon the
street one of the early nursery mothers who for five years had
been living in another part of the city, and in response to my
query as to the welfare of her five children, she bitterly
replied, "All of them except Mary have been arrested at one time
or another, thank you." In reply to my remark that I thought her
husband had always had such admirable control over them, she
burst out, "That has been the whole trouble. I got tired taking
care of him and didn't believe that his laziness was all due to
his health, as he said, so I left him and said that I would
support the children, but not him. From that minute the trouble
with the four boys began. I never knew what they were doing, and
after every sort of a scrape I finally put Jack and the twins
into institutions where I pay for them. Joe has gone to work at
last, but with a disgraceful record behind him. I tell you I
ain't so sure that because a woman can make big money that she
can be both father and mother to her children."
As I walked on, I could but wonder in which particular we are
most stupid--to judge a man's worth so solely by his wage-earning
capacity that a good wife feels justified in leaving him, or in
holding fast to that wretched delusion that a woman can both
support and nurture her children.
One of the most piteous revelations of the futility of the latter
attempt came to me through the mother of "Goosie," as the
children for years called a little boy who, because he was
brought to the nursery wrapped up in his mother's shawl, always
had his hair filled with the down and small feathers from the
feather brush factory where she worked. One March morning,
Goosie's mother was hanging out the washing on a shed roof before
she left for the factory. Five-year-old Goosie was trotting at
her heels handing her clothes pins, when he was suddenly blown
off the roof by the high wind into the alley below. His neck was
broken by the fall, and as he lay piteous and limp on a pile of
frozen refuse, his mother cheerily called him to "climb up
again," so confident do overworked mothers become that their
children cannot get hurt. After the funeral, as the poor mother
sat in the nursery postponing the moment when she must go back to
her empty rooms, I asked her, in a futile effort to be of
comfort, if there was anything more we could do for her. The
overworked, sorrow-stricken woman looked up and replied, "If you
could give me my wages for to-morrow, I would not go to work in
the factory at all. I would like to stay at home all day and
hold the baby. Goosie was always asking me to take him and I
never had any time." This statement revealed the condition of
many nursery mothers who are obliged to forego the joys and
solaces which belong to even the most poverty-stricken. The long
hours of factory labor necessary for earning the support of a
child leave no time for the tender care and caressing which may
enrich the life of the most piteous baby.
With all of the efforts made by modern society to nurture and
educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of
young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the
world! It is curiously inconsistent that with the emphasis which
this generation has placed upon the mother and upon the
prolongation of infancy, we constantly allow the waste of this
most precious material. I cannot recall without indignation a
recent experience. I was detained late one evening in an office
building by a prolonged committee meeting of the Board of
Education. As I came out at eleven o'clock, I met in the
corridor of the fourteenth floor a woman whom I knew, on her
knees scrubbing the marble tiling. As she straightened up to
greet me, she seemed so wet from her feet up to her chin, that I
hastily inquired the cause. Her reply was that she left home at
five o'clock every night and had no opportunity for six hours to
nurse her baby. Her mother's milk mingled with the very water
with which she scrubbed the floors until she should return at
midnight, heated and exhausted, to feed her screaming child with
what remained within her breasts.
These are only a few of the problems connected with the lives of
the poorest people with whom the residents in a Settlement are
constantly brought in contact.
I cannot close this chapter without a reference to that gallant
company of men and women among whom my acquaintance is so large,
who are fairly indifferent to starvation itself because of their
preoccupation with higher ends. Among them are visionaries and
enthusiasts, unsuccessful artists, writers, and reformers. For
many years at Hull-House, we knew a well-bred German woman who was
completely absorbed in the experiment of expressing musical
phrases and melodies by means of colors. Because she was small
and deformed, she stowed herself into her trunk every night, where
she slept on a canvas stretched hammock-wise from the four corners
and her food was of the meagerest; nevertheless if a visitor left
an offering upon her table, it was largely spent for apparatus or
delicately colored silk floss, with which to pursue the
fascinating experiment. Another sadly crippled old woman, the
widow of a sea captain, although living almost exclusively upon
malted milk tablets as affording a cheap form of prepared food,
was always eager to talk of the beautiful illuminated manuscripts
she had sought out in her travels and to show specimens of her own
work as an illuminator. Still another of these impressive old
women was an inveterate inventor. Although she had seen prosperous
days in England, when we knew her, she subsisted largely upon the
samples given away at the demonstration counters of the department
stores, and on bits of food which she cooked on a coal shovel in
the furnace of the apartment house whose basement back room she
occupied. Although her inventions were not practicable, various
experts to whom they were submitted always pronounced them
suggestive and ingenious. I once saw her receive this
complimentary verdict--"this ribbon to stick in her coat"--with
such dignity and gravity that the words of condolence for her
financial disappointment, died upon my lips.
These indomitable souls are but three out of many whom I might
instance to prove that those who are handicapped in the race for
life's goods, sometimes play a magnificent trick upon the jade,
life herself, by ceasing to know whether or not they possess any
of her tawdry goods and chattels.