So do you all remember when we were reading the American History textbook together and we learned about Jane Adams at the Settlement in Chicago? This is a memoir written by her about the first twenty years at Hull-House. Which was a house/settlement she created in Northwest Chicago to help the immigrants who mostly worked in factories have better lives.
Jane Adams was involved in the suffrage movement, but that was only a small part of what she did. She was mostly involved in attempting to “socialize democracy” as she put it. At Hull-House they worked on countless projects and countless people lived and/or worked there to bring the different immigrant communities together and to meet their social needs. They did this with social groups, education, trash removal, childcare, leisure activities, museums, arts, etc.
At one point in this book Jane was involved in the trash collection for the city, having a position that paid $1,000/per year. The position involved being a part of trying to figure out how to keep the city clean because there was so much trash and filth on the streets that it was causing disease. This was around the late 1800’s. At one point they picked up 18 inches of trash off the street and found that the street was actually paved underneath. Can you imagine a foot and half of trash on the street and people just walking on top of it? And horses walking on top of it too? The trash situation really did cause disease. Typhod fever or a fever of some sort was a big deal back then and Jane actually got it as well.
Flies passed around disease and the trash attracted flies. Can you imagine walking on 18 inches of trash mixed with horse shit and people pooh and then walking into your home. You would literally be tracking in all kinds of shit and disease. Sanitation was something that took a long time to create. Hull-House also helped create local bathhouses where people could bath because most of the tenements did not have bathtubs or bathrooms either.
Immigrants from all over flocked to all the big American cities around this time period. Slavery had ended in the south and people were moving north to find opportunity. People were coming here from all over the world. The factory work in big cities was attracting people like the flies on shit in the streets. But there were no programs for social welfare. They had to be created.
Creating programs to care for people’s social needs in a democracy was something that had to be done carefully. Because how do you create social programs in a democracy without becoming socialist? Very carefully.
It took some time, but in twenty years Jane and Hull-House created a lot of change. And Jane not only was involved with other Settlements throughout the nation, but internationally as well. She came from a very privileged background and did not have to work. She had inherited wealth and often went to Europe to study and see the world. When she got typhoid fever she went to Europe to recover.
“You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.”
“…he also bears with him the consciousness that he had given himself over so many years to classic learning-that when suddenly called upon for a quick decision in the world of life and death, he had been able to act only through a literary suggestion. This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes.”
Jane spent most of her life studying and traveling until she started Hull-House. She got to the point where she knew that accumulating more knowledge would not help her obtain more wisdom. She had to live and do things. School was not going to help her prepare. She just had to jump in the deep end so to speak. Hull-House was her first big jump. And what a jump it was. Settlements worldwide were still somewhat new and they operated differently based on the needs of the communities around them. There was not a large blueprint for what she did.
“It is true that there is nothing after disease, indigence and a sense of guilt, so fatal to health and to life itself as the want of a proper outlet for active faculties.”
Jane believed in purpose. And she believed her purpose was to use her upper-class status and privilege to help the lower classes. She knew that she would not be able to live her upper-class life without the lower classes doing their jobs.
“Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives form of expression that has peculiar value.”
Jane believed in society being a symbiotic relationship. She believed in the interconnectedness of the world, but most certainly the local community in which one lives and works.
“Would it not provoke to ironic laughter that very nemesis which presides over the destinies of nations, if the most autocratic government yet remaining in the civilization should succeed in utilizing for its own autocratic methods the youngest and most daring experiment in democratic government which the world has ever seen? Stranger results have followed a course of stupidity and injustice resulting from blindness and panic!”
America definitely made some mistakes along the way to being where we are today. But every government or leader has made mistakes. And it is the people who pay for those mistakes. Democracy is the system, but it does not mean that everything the democracy does is going to be correct or right in general or for everyone. We must live and learn. Especially, when it came to creating policy and systems of processes for social well-being.
Jane often refers to America as something of a social experiment because there was nothing to base it on. No government like it exited to take knowledge and wisdom from. It was a capitalist democratic experiment. She had studied greatly to help shape this experiment.
Twenty Years At Hull-House is an excellent book. I would suggest it to anyone looking to get better acquainted with what was happening around the turn of the 20th century. The first twenty years of hull house were 1889-1909. So this book gives a perfect window into the turn of the 20th century.
When they found pavement under 18 inches of trash on the street, that is when I was enlightened. Things were so different back then. Can you imagine millions of people living in a city and throwing not only their trash on the street, but their human waste on the street too. And there were no cars. The horses shit on the streets too. Can you imagine how awful the smell was? I know I think cities stink now. I cannot imagine how much they used to smell 120 years ago!
People were suffering, being worked to death, new to the country, speaking a new language, and tying their children to kitchen tables while they went to work. But what really made it all set in was thinking of the smell and walking in shit on the streets. I get upset when I see dog shit on the side of the sidewalk that hasn’t been picked up. I cannot imagine the whole sidewalk being shit. And the disease that would go along with this, oh my god. It is a visceral experience when you think about it like this.