Twenty Years at Hull House

PROBLEMS OF POVERTY

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.

[Editor:  Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

This chapter has been put on-line as part of the buildAbook Initiative at the Celebration of Women Writers.  Initial text entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of volunteer Flo Carrierre.

“I am a full-time staff at University, continuing my studies on a part-time basis.  I volunteer in the community, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to make a difference in the Celebration of Women Writers by contributing time to enter book chapters.”—­Flo Carrierre.

[Editor:  Mary Mark Ockerbloom]

[A Celebration of Women Writers]

“Chapter ix:  A Decade of Economic Discussion.” by Jane Addams (1860-1935) From:  Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes. by Jane Addams.  New York:  The MacMillan Company, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 177-197.

[Editor:  Mary Mark Ockerbloom]