INTRODUCING THREE CASES
Case 2: Jane Addams and Hull House
commented that my work would position this already leading agency still further as a leader in the field. I gained an appreciation for the phrase ‘home- lessness industry’. The passage of federal laws and the growth of federal fund- ing means more and more NPOs in the homelessness ‘business’.
Public opinion and policy has often split in two directions, one viewing the problem as having to do with defective persons needing rehabilitation, the other deriving homelessness from economic and political policies (Marcuse, 2001). The former approach emphasizes social services; the other, housing.
Backing these viewpoints, thought leaders and decision makers line up in government agencies, research and policymaking institutions, NPOs, profes- sional associations and institutions, and local communities. What is now an industry began humbly – with activists and hunger strikes, and with the poor, who are still among us.
serving on committees of local charity organizations’ (Polikoff, 1999, p. 55).
Addams described Toynbee Hall in a letter to a friend: ‘It is a community of university men who live there, have their recreating clubs and society all among the poor people yet in the same style they would in their own circle. It is so far from professional “doing good”, so unaffectedly sincere and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries that it seems perfectly ideal’ (cited in Polikoff, 1999, p. 55).
Addams did not, however, stumble blindly to Toynbee House nor did she do so as an empty slate. An especially influential event on the European trip was a bullfight in Madrid. Addams’s correspondence indicates that she was struck by this experience. While her two friends could not witness the event and left the arena, she herself remained for six kills. This shocked Addams’s friends and subsequently Addams herself. Reflecting on the event, Addams
‘concluded that she had been so caught up recalling the great amphitheater in ancient Rome where Christian gladiators gallantly faced martyrdom, that she had not registered the utter cruelty of inciting a bull to anger and then slaugh- tering it’ (Polikoff, 1999, p. 52). ‘The natural and inevitable reaction came . . . and in the deep chagrin I felt myself tried and condemned, not only by the disgusting experience but by the entire moral situation which it revealed’
(Addams, 1910, p. 86). During this trip, Addams ‘gradually reached the conviction that the first generation of college women had developed too exclu- sively 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’
(Addams, 1910, p. 71). She attacked 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 . . . 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 useless- ness (Addams, 1910, p. 71).
Referencing her own upbringing, Addams wrote:
Well-meaning parents set their daughters up to feel this disharmony by teaching them . . . to be self-forgetting and self-sacrificing, deliberately exposing them to the misery in the world by accompanying them to lectures on famines in India and China . . . But when the daughter graduated from college and attempted to do work to alleviate the suffering of the ‘submerged tenth’ the family claim is strenuously asserted; she is told that her efforts are ‘unjustified and ill-advised’ (Addams, cited in Polikoff, 1999, p. 91).
Addams explained her idea to found Hull House:
It is hard to tell when the very simple plan which afterward developed into the Settlement began to form itself in my mind . . . I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in the part of the city where many primi- tive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study, might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself, where they might try out some of the things they had been taught and put truth to ‘the ultimate test of the conduct it dictates or inspires’ (Addams, 1910, p. 85).
Addams selected Chicago as the site for her ‘scheme’, as she called it. The writer, Lincoln Steffens, described the city as ‘first in violence, deepest in dirt, loud, lawless, unlovely, ill smelling, criminally wide open, commercially brazen, socially thoughtless and raw’ (cited in Polikoff, 1999, p. 57). Irish immigrants fled the famine, German men and families fled the military, polit- ical exiles fled Russia. Looking for a better life in the US, many found barely subsistent wages if not unemployment, dangerous workplaces, tenement hous- ing, poor or nonexistent sanitation, and disease. Addams’s search for moral and financial support resembles the stereotypical entrepreneurial pursuit; for example, she won the backing of Julius Rosenwald, head of Sears Roebuck.
Once a house was found and established, there was
nothing dramatic about the opening of Hull House yet it was an historic event, for here was the beginning of what was to be one of the greatest social movements in modern America – the Settlement House movement (Henry Steele Commager, writ- ing the introduction to the first edition of Addams’s book [1990]).
There is, however, one interesting departure from the stereotype: ‘Jane had no set plan for what she . . . would do on a day-to-day basis. Like an author who discovers what her book is about as she writes it, Jane discovered what Hull House was about by opening its doors and inviting her neighbors in. This lack of any planned program was deliberate. Following Toynbee Hall’s model, she wanted Hull House to be ‘flexible and able to respond to neighbors’ needs as they arose’ (Polikoff, 1999, p. 69). Addams’s partner, Ellen Gates Starr, wrote to Jane concerning the readiness of several local girls who were
glad to come and stay awhile and learn to know the people and understand them and their ways of life; to give out of their culture and leisure and over-indulgence and to receive the culture that comes of self-denial and poverty and failure which these people have always known (Polikoff, 1999, pp. 69–70).
Perhaps most extraordinary of all, she wrote: ‘There is to be no organization and no institution about it. The world is overstocked with institutions and organizations’.
Three years later, speaking about Hull House to academic and professional
audiences, Addams divided the activities of the House into four areas: social, educational, and humanitarian, and civic. ‘They are not formally or consciously thus divided . . . but broadly separate according to the receptivity of the neighbors’ (cited in Polikoff, 1999, p. 90). (Addams evidently made the distinction for the benefit of her audience – it was not an operational distinc- tion she used to ‘manage’ the settlement house.) When asked if Hull House was a philanthropic endeavor, Addams said that it was
unfair to apply the word philanthropic to Hull House as a whole . . . Working people live in the same streets with those in need of charity, but they themselves, so long as they have health and good wages, require none of it. As one of their numbers has said, they require only that their aspirations be recognized and stimulated, and the means of attaining them put at their disposal. Hull House makes a constant effort to secure these means for its neighbors, but to call that effort philanthropy is to use the word unfairly and to underestimate the duties of good citizenship (Addams cited in Polikoff, 1999, p. 91).
Also, as noted above, Addams saw Hull House as an opportunity for overly indulged local girls to ‘give out of their culture and leisure’. She made no distinction between the provider and the user; they were one and the same.
As cited earlier, at least one prominent historian asserted that Hull House launched the larger social movement of settlement houses. In 1891, there were six settlement houses in the US; by 1900, there were over a hundred (Polikoff, 1999, p. 89). Addams did identify herself with, and was held by others to be a leader of, this movement (Polikoff, 1999, p. 92). Her work continues, although reshaped, to our day (Trolander, 1987).