Twenty Years at Hull House

“Only as we neared the church door did I venture to ask what could be done about it, receiving the reply that it might never be righted so far as clothes went, but that people might be equal in things that mattered much more than clothes, the affairs of education and religion, for instance, which we attended to when we went to school and church, and that it was very stupid to wear the sort of clothes that made it harder to have equality even there.”

Addams emphasizes her father’s influence on her childhood because he instilled moral concerns and a desire for social justice. One day when Jane had dressed in a gorgeous, new cloak, her father advised her to wear her old, warm cloak to avoid making the other little girls feel badly. This incident heightened Jane’s awareness of economic inequalities. She learned from her father that providing people with access to education and freedom to worship could improve their condition.

“That sense of solitude, of being unsheltered in a wide world of relentless and elemental forces which is at the basis of childhood's timidity and which is far from outgrown at fifteen, seized me irresistibly before I could reach the narrow stairs and summon the family from below.”

When Addams watched over the ailing, elderly nurse who had reared her, she witnessed the woman’s departure from life. In this description of Addams’s first experience of someone’s death: her sense of solitude and being unsheltered in a wide world of relentless forces, one can trace Addams’s later impulse to create a welcoming house of volunteers that provided a social safety net for struggling people in a community.

“It is impossible to recall the conversation with the complete breakdown of my cheap arguments, but in the end I obtained that which I have ever regarded as a valuable possession, a sense of the genuine relationship which may exist between men who share large hopes and like desires, even though they differ in nationality, language, and creed; that those things count for absolutely nothing between groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy.”

Addams describes her childhood discovery of her father’s admiration for Joseph Mazzini, a republican leader for the unification of Italy. When Addams saw her father solemnly reading a newspaper article about Mazzini’s death, she did not understand why he would care about the passing of a stranger who was not American. Her father taught her to think about international affairs and to recognize that the bond of idealistic humanity can transcend differences of nationality, language, and religion.

“Thousands of children in the sixties and seventies, in the simplicity which is given to the understanding of a child, caught a notion of imperishable heroism when they were told that brave men had lost their lives that the slaves might be free.”

In this passage, Addams explains the influence of the Civil War on her generation. In her childhood, she developed a concept of idealistic heroism from the news that soldiers were giving their lives in the battle to end slavery. These heroic examples deepened her lifelong concern for the plight of African Americans.

“In the first place, they had so large a fund of common experience; they too had pioneered in a western country, and had urged the development of canals and railroads in order that the raw prairie crops might be transported to market; they too had realized that if this last tremendous experiment in self-government failed here, it would be the disappointment of the centuries and that upon their ability to organize self-government in state, county, and town depended the verdict of history.”

Early pioneers of Illinois, such as Addams’s father and his friend Lyman Trumbull, who had established their farms and their businesses greatly influenced her philosophical development. These self-reliant men had personally known President Lincoln and understood the importance of the success of America’s experiment in democracy. Senator Trumbull had co-authored the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States.

“Why should an American be lost in admiration of a group of Oxford students because they went out to mend a disused road, inspired thereto by Ruskin's teaching for the bettering of the common life, when all the country roads in America were mended each spring by self-respecting citizens, who were thus carrying out the simple method devised by a democratic government for providing highways.”

Although Addams was greatly inspired by the English Settlement, Toynbee Hall, she felt that the Settlement Movement in America could not be a mere imitation of the English movement. America’s democratic principles provided a different context for social action than the efforts undertaken by the rigidly class-conscious English.

“Perhaps this early companionship showed me how essentially similar are the various forms of social effort, and curiously enough, the actual activities of a missionary school are not unlike many that are carried on in a Settlement situated in a foreign quarter.”

As a young woman, Addams attended Rockford Female Seminary which had a large proportion of Protestant missionaries among its graduates. She notes that missionaries who had returned to America from service abroad were the most comprehending visitors to Hull-House. Since Hull-House was located in a neighborhood composed of immigrants from different foreign cultures, the reformers tried to help with their life needs, including English language instruction, so their ardent efforts were similar to those of missionaries in a foreign country.

“I gradually reached a conviction that the first generation of college women had taken their learning too quickly, had departed too suddenly from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers; that the contemporary education of young women had developed too exclusively the power of acquiring knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere in the process of 'being educated' they had lost that simple and almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of suffering or of helplessness; that they are so sheltered and pampered they have no chance even to make "the great refusal.”

Addams points out that the gains of contemporary women’s education, the emphasis on reading and civilizing travel, had also created a loss: the capacity of earlier women to be useful in responding to human needs. Adams felt smothered by her advantages, too pampered to even be able to make “the great refusal.” Addams cites a phrase, “the great refusal,” from Dante’s Inferno when an unworthy person refused to do a task that was within his power to undertake.

“This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all about her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her; it peers at her in the form of heavy-laden market women and underpaid street laborers, gibing her with a sense of her uselessness.”

Addams extrapolates from her own experience that a generation of sheltered, educated young women felt a sense of futility and misdirected energy. Addams believes that the middle class cannot truly insulate themselves from the ills of industrial society; for a person to truly progress, the rest of society must be improved as well. In Addams’s famous essay “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” she points out that the Settlement Movement provides a positive outlet for the young, middle-class residents as well as aid to impoverished, immigrant neighborhoods.

“There was also growing within me an almost passionate devotion to the ideals of democracy, and when in all history had these ideals been so thrillingly expressed as when the faith of the fisherman and the slave had been boldly opposed to the accepted moral belief that the well-being of a privileged few might justly be built upon the ignorance and sacrifice of the many?”

Addams explains why she decided to be baptized and join the Presbyterian church in her village when she was 25 years old. No one had pressured her, and she did not take this step out of a desire to conform. In the book, Addams stresses the connection between democracy and Christian egalitarianism. Her wording, “the faith of the fisherman and the slave,” emphasizes the working class and the enslaved followers of Christianity. In her personal life, Addams had struggled with depression and disillusionment about the effect of mere intellectual exploration upon moral development, before returning in humility to her childhood acceptance of the Gospel teachings.

“Who was I, with my dreams of universal fellowship, that I did not identify myself with the institutional statement of this belief, as it stood in the little village in which I was born, and without which testimony in each remote hamlet of Christendom it would be so easy for the world to slip back into the doctrines of selection and aristocracy?”

Addams also joined the church out of a longing for an outward symbol of fellowship. She believed that without Christianity’s doctrine of love to help the weak and the poor, the world would focus on the Darwinian doctrine of natural selection, emphasizing survival of the fittest, or rule by an aristocratic elite.

“I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the ever-lasting "preparation for life," however ill-prepared I might be.”

After witnessing a bullfight in Madrid, Spain, Addams was pricked by her conscience into realizing that she was deferring her purpose by continuing to idly travel. She had told herself that this was all preparation for great things to come. Now she planned to start a Settlement House in Chicago. Years later, Addams read Tolstoy’s phrase, “the snare of preparation” and realized that she had fallen into that inactivity of young people who are merely “preparing” for life instead of acting.

“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.”

Addams believed that opening a large, welcoming home staffed by American middle-class reformers in an urban, immigrant-filled neighborhood would help bridge the gulf between new arrivals from the Old World and those born in the U.S. As Addams and her residents helped to Americanize these immigrants, they also tried to remain tolerant of diverse faiths and cultures.

“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.”

Addams states the objectives of Hull-House: to provide a community center for social, educational, and charitable activities, as well as to identify neighborhood needs and seek to reform unjust conditions. From the very first days of the Settlement, Hull-House residents tried to help their neighbors, including managing a kindergarten, establishing clubs for older children, and assisting the elderly.

“The Settlement movement is only one manifestation of that wider humanitarian movement which throughout Christendom, but pre-eminently in England, is endeavoring to embody itself, not in a sect, but in society itself.”

The Social Gospel movement, in which some Protestants sought to extend Christian ethics to issues of social justice, such as economic inequality, was prominent in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. Although Addams created a secular Settlement to welcome people of diverse religious faiths, she saw the Settlement as expressing the spirit of Christ in social action in the community, beyond the boundaries of a church.

“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.”

Addams shares mistakes made at Hull-House in her account of the Settlement to demonstrate the necessity of reformers to adapt: learning what the neighborhood would accept, instead of only imposing their theories. The reformers initially thought that starting a Hull-House public kitchen would create more nutritious, cost-saving meals for the immigrants. They did not count on the diversity of ethnic tastes. Immigrants preferred their own traditional foods. However, the Hull-House residents did discover that they could provide a successful coffeehouse, which was a safer, more attractive place for the immigrants’ social gatherings.

“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.”

Another harsh lesson learned by Addams was not to rigidly apply scientific methods and regulations. Addams discovered the danger of treating a problem in isolation and the need to consider the whole context. She had been instructed to tell an unemployed man to exhaust the possibility of obtaining work on a drainage canal before he applied for relief. However, he told her that he had always worked indoors and could not endure outdoors work in winter. The man tried to dig on the canal but caught pneumonia and died, leaving two children.

“Our very first Christmas at Hull-House, when we as yet knew nothing of child labor, a number of little girls refused the candy which was offered them as part of the Christmas good cheer, saying simply that they ‘worked in a candy factory and could not bear the sight of it.’”

Addams cites the incident of the little girls refusing the Hull-House gifts of Christmas candy to demonstrate how the educated, middle-class reformers had to learn from their working-class neighbors about the harsh economic conditions. As Addams and the Hull-House residents gained knowledge of the long, working hours and injuries incurred by laboring children, they realized that they needed to compile information and urge the passage of protective legislation. In order to protect the children, the Hull-House women had to lobby government and expand their efforts into the legal and political spheres.

“Of course the children had been working in the sugar mills for years, and had probably gone back and forth under the very eyes of the club women, but the women had never seen them, much less felt any obligation to protect them, until they joined a club, and the club joined a Federation, and the Federation appointed a Child Labor Committee who sent them a schedule.”

Addams uses the example of a Florida woman’s club that never felt any obligation to protect the children laboring nearby in sugar mills until the Federation of Woman’s Clubs sent a schedule for the subordinate club to fill out reporting the number of children working in the vicinity. Addams notes that an increase in moral sensibility is required for social progress and sometimes people do not see a concrete case until it is framed as a social obligation within a larger movement.

“To my mind at that moment the speaker had passed from the region of the uncultivated person into the possibilities of the cultivated person.”

Addams defines an uncultivated person as one who has a narrow outlook on life, unable to overcome his prejudice against someone else’s different customs and appearance. In contrast, the cultivated person is a citizen of the world because of his increasing understanding of a variety of people and different cultures. Addams points out that American youth are often sent to college or on a European trip to gain a larger outlook, but this perspective may be acquired in other ways. Addams recounts a Hull-House social evening when the prosperous Irish American members of the Woman’s Club interacted with South Italian peasant men. An Irish American woman became ashamed of her long-held bias against the Italians and recognized their common humanity; therefore, transforming into a cultivated person.

“I was quick with that defense which an American is obliged to use so often in Europe, that our very democracy so long presupposed that each citizen could care for himself that we are slow to develop a sense of social obligation.”

Addams refers to the comments of an English visitor about Chicago leading citizens’ lack of knowledge regarding the conditions of the poor in their city in comparison with the public-spiritedness of London’s leading citizens. Addams explains that the Americans’ ideal of pioneering self-reliance made them slower to recognize that some community members needed extra help.

“The only method by which a reasonable and loyal conception of government may be substituted for the one formed upon Russian experiences is that the actual experience of refugees with government in America shall gradually demonstrate what a very different thing government means here.”

Although classes in citizenship were taught at Hull-House, Addams points out that the way immigrants are actually treated by the American government forms their new ideas. During the Averbuch incident in Chicago, a young Russian-Jewish immigrant was shot to death as a suspected anarchist assassin. Addams tried to uphold the U.S. legal system when widespread fear of a possible anarchistic plot prompted the Chicago police to use drastic search methods in the Russian-Jewish neighborhood. Addams believes it is important for the immigrants to be able to see that the democratic American government’s guaranteed protection of constitutional rights differs from the Russian government’s autocratic methods.

“To feed the mind of the worker, to lift it above the monotony of his task, and to connect it with the larger world, outside of his immediate surroundings, has always been the object of art, perhaps never more nobly fulfilled than by the great English bard.”

Addams describes why Hull-House emphasizes giving laborers access to art and literature: to stimulate the imagination, provide inspiration and solace, as well as encourage self-discovery and self-expression. The first building constructed for Hull-House contained an art gallery in which the social reformers exhibited the best art available in Chicago, exposing the urban neighborhood to works of beauty.