About the Work
Hull-House Maps and Papers is a collaborative sociological study produced by the residents of Hull-House, the pioneering settlement house founded by Jane Addams in Chicago. Published in January 1895, the work presents a series of observational studies and statistical analyses of the impoverished immigrant neighborhood surrounding Hull-House on Chicago’s Near West Side. The book combines detailed cartographic work—including color-coded maps showing the nationalities and wage levels of residents—with written essays examining the social, economic, and industrial conditions of the district.
“The residents of Hull-House offer these maps and papers to the public, not as exhaustive treatises, but as recorded observations which may possibly be of value, because they are immediate, and the result of long acquaintance.”
The prefatory note, written by Jane Addams, establishes the work’s purpose and context. She explains that the word “settlement” was becoming familiar to the American public, though the first settlement, Toynbee Hall in East London, had been established only as recently as 1885. Canon Barnett, Toynbee Hall’s founder, had urged as the primal ideal that a group of university men should reside in the poorer quarter of London to influence the people toward better local government and a wider social and intellectual life. Since 1889, more than twenty settlements had been established in America, some associated with various institutional features, but the original idea of a group of “residents” remaining the essential factor.
The residents of Hull-House offered these maps and papers to the public not as exhaustive treatises but as recorded observations of value because they were immediate and the result of long acquaintance. All the writers had been in actual residence at Hull-House, some for five years; their energies, however, had been directed chiefly not toward sociological investigation but toward constructive work. The colors from Charles Booth’s wage maps of London were retained, and, as in his appended essays, each writer was responsible for the statements appearing over his own signature. The papers did not deal with settlement methods or results but simply recorded certain phases of neighborhood life with which the writers had become most familiar. The appendix was a cursory review of the present activities of Hull-House.
The map notes and comments, prepared by Agnes Sinclair Holbrook, describe the work as resulting from an attempt by Hull-House residents to put into graphic form facts about the section of Chicago immediately east of the House. The district boundaries were Halsted Street on the west, State on the east, Polk on the north, and Twelfth Street on the south. The inhabitants were chiefly foreigners. This third of a square mile included, east of the river, a criminal district ranking as one of the most openly and flagrantly vicious in the civilized world, and west of the same stream, the poorest and probably most crowded section of Chicago.
Context
The book emerges from a specific historical moment in American social reform. The settlement movement, imported from England, represented a new approach to urban poverty: educated men and women taking up residence in poor neighborhoods to learn from and assist their inhabitants. Hull-House itself, situated at the extreme northwest of the district on Halsted near Polk, had been established in 1889, and by the time of the book’s publication, its residents had accumulated years of firsthand experience.
The immediate impetus for the maps came from a government investigation. A Special Investigation of the Slums of Great Cities was undertaken in spring 1893 by the United States Department of Labor by order of Congress. Mrs. Florence Kelley, Special Agent Expert in charge in Chicago, resided at Hull-House while conducting the investigation. Four government schedule men worked from April 6 to July 10, 1893, examining each house, tenement, and room, filling out tenement and family schedules. Schedules were returned daily to Mrs. Kelley; before forwarding to the Commissioner of Labor, a Hull-House resident copied each individual’s nationality, wages when employed, and weeks idle during the year beginning April 1, 1892.
The book thus sits at the intersection of several reform movements: the settlement movement, the emerging field of empirical sociology, the campaign against child labor, the movement for factory legislation, and the broader Progressive-era concern with urban conditions. The contributors were not detached academics but resident reformers engaged in constructive work—the establishment of clubs, classes, and social services—who used statistical investigation as a tool for social change.
The period was one of massive immigration. The neighborhood described contained eighteen nationalities, with Italians, Jews, and Bohemians leading in numbers, and Irish controlling the polls. The district west of the river was the poorest and most crowded section of Chicago, while east of the river lay a notorious criminal district. The book captures this population at a moment of economic crisis: the winter of 1893-1894, following the panic of 1893, brought severe unemployment and distress, conditions reflected in the wage statistics and charitable records the residents compiled.
Structure of the Book
The book opens with Jane Addams’s prefatory note, establishing the settlement context and the purpose of the work. This is followed by Agnes Sinclair Holbrook’s map notes and comments, which explain the methodology of the investigation, describe the physical character of the district, and provide keys to the color-coded maps of nationalities and wages. The maps themselves—showing the distribution of ethnic groups and the wage levels of residents block by block—constitute the book’s most innovative feature, adapting Charles Booth’s London methods to the Chicago context.
The first major essay is Florence Kelley’s study of the sweating-system, examining the garment industry’s practice of contracting work out to tenement-house shops. Kelley describes the organization of inside shops, the role of sweaters, the conditions of tenement production, and the relationship between manufacturers, contractors, and workers. She details the nationalities involved—Russian Jews and Bohemians as sweaters, Italians as home finishers—and the physical conditions of the shops, which were without exception in tenement houses or rear buildings facing alleys.
Following Kelley’s essay is her study of wage-earning children, which examines the legal provisions of the Illinois Workshop and Factories Act, the results of its enforcement, and the various categories of working children in the Nineteenth Ward: newsboys and bootblacks, cash-children in retail stores, and factory children. Kelley presents individual case studies of child workers, including Joseph Poderovsky, a rachitic boy found running a heavy buttonhole machine; Bennie Kelman, a Russian Jew with a severe rupture; and Annie Cihlar, a delicate girl whose employer produced fraudulent health certificates. She concludes with recommendations for legislation and a discussion of the relationship between child labor and family poverty.
Isabel Eaton contributes a comparative study of the receipts and expenditures of cloakmakers in Chicago and New York, based on material collected during a three-month residence at Hull-House. Eaton presents detailed statistics on wages, incomes, indebtedness, rents, and living costs, comparing the situations of single men and family men in both cities.
Charles Zeublin’s essay on the Chicago Ghetto traces the history of Jewish settlement in Chicago from 1843, describes the physical and social characteristics of the present-day Ghetto, and examines its institutions: the synagogue, the Chevras (smaller religious congregations), the Jewish Training School, the Maxwell Street Settlement, the Self Educational Club, and the Yiddish theatre. Zeublin concludes with reflections on the forces working for the Ghetto’s eventual annihilation.
Josefa Humpal Zeman contributes a study of the Bohemian people in Chicago, describing their history, their move westward after the great fire, their building and loan associations, their freethinking movement, their societies and newspapers, and their political evolution from Republicanism to Democracy. Zeman defends the Bohemians against charges of clannishness, placing blame on American prejudice and the press.
Alessandro Mastro-Valerio’s remarks upon the Italian colony in Chicago examine the Italians’ sojourner mentality—their intention to return to Italy—and their classification as unskilled laborers. Mastro-Valerio argues that Italians could be good farmers and advocates sending them to agricultural work as the only means of regeneration. He describes the Italian newspaper L’Italia‘s crusade against ragpicking and the political pressure that defeated the ordinance against it.
Julia C. Lathrop’s essay on the Cook County Charities concludes the substantive essays, examining the county institutions—the infirmary and insane asylum at Dunning—that served as the last resort for the district’s population. Lathrop presents statistics on admissions, describes the physical conditions of the institutions, and notes the striking increase in the male population of the infirmary during the depression winter of 1893-1894.
The book closes with an appendix reviewing the present activities of Hull-House, described in the prefatory note as a cursory review of the settlement’s work.
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
The Prefatory Note and the Purpose of the Maps
The volume opens with a prefatory note by Jane Addams, dated January 1895, which situates the work within the broader settlement movement. Addams observes that while the word “settlement” is becoming familiar to the American public, the first such institution, Toynbee Hall in East London, was only established as recently as 1885. Its founder, Canon Barnett, articulated the primal ideal: a group of university men should reside in a poorer quarter of London to influence residents toward better local government and a wider social and intellectual life. Since 1889, more than twenty settlements had been established in America, some with various institutional features, but Addams insists that the original idea of a group of “residents” must always remain the essential factor. The residents of Hull-House offer their maps and papers not as exhaustive treatises but as recorded observations, valuable because they are immediate and the result of long acquaintance. All the writers have been in actual residence at Hull-House, some for five years, though their energies have been directed chiefly toward constructive work rather than sociological investigation. The colors from Charles Booth’s wage maps of London have been retained, and each writer is responsible for the statements over his or her own signature. The papers do not deal with settlement methods or results but simply record certain phases of neighborhood life, with the appendix serving as a cursory review of Hull-House’s present activities.
The Geography and Character of the District
Agnes Sinclair Holbrook’s map notes begin by describing the attempt to graphically represent the facts of the section of Chicago immediately east of Hull-House. The district is bounded by Halsted Street on the west, State Street on the east, Polk Street on the north, and Twelfth Street on the south. This third of a square mile includes, east of the river, a criminal district ranking as one of the most openly and flagrantly vicious in the civilized world, and west of the stream, the poorest and most crowded section of Chicago. Hull-House itself is situated at the extreme northwest corner, on Halsted near Polk. The main thoroughfares are lined with small shops and factory fronts, while the cross streets are filled with dwelling-houses built for one family but generally tenanted by several. The enumeration reveals eighty-one saloons west of the river, with wooden buildings outnumbering brick by roughly two to one. The only stone front of interest is No. 137 DeKoven Street, the site of the outbreak of the great Chicago fire. The poorest tiny wooden houses offer nothing compared to the hideousness inside the larger, higher tenements, and the rear tenements and alleys form the core of the district where the densest crowds of the most wretched congregate. The description notes filthy tenements, dingy courts, and garbage piles alive with diseased odors, with over seventy-five children counted in the open street in a single block. The people are noticeably undersized and unhealthy, with tuberculosis prevailing and child mortality great.
The Government Investigation and Its Methods
A special investigation of the slums of great cities was undertaken in the spring of 1893 by the United States Department of Labor, with Mrs. Florence Kelley serving as Special Agent Expert in charge in Chicago while residing at Hull-House. Four government schedule men worked from April 6 to July 10, 1893, examining each house, tenement, and room, and filling out schedules that were returned daily to Mrs. Kelley. Before forwarding them to the Commissioner of Labor, a Hull-House resident copied each individual’s nationality, wages when employed, and weeks idle during the year. The author acknowledges that errors are inevitable, as those questioned are frequently careless, and the one-year investigation period means neither buildings nor tenants remain unchanged. West of the river, most dwellings are wooden, temporary structures, frequently moved on rollers to make way for factories, and families move constantly. Despite inaccuracies, the charts faithfully portray the region’s character during the recorded year. The notes aim to make the maps intelligible, presenting conditions rather than advancing theories, and Hull-House offers these facts hoping to stimulate inquiry and action. The insistent probing into the poor’s lives would be unjustifiable if the statistics were too inconsiderable for improvement, but the conviction remains that public conscience, when roused, must demand better surroundings for the most inert citizens.
The Map of Nationalities
The classification of nationalities distinguishes groups forming different social and industrial elements. The English-speaking class includes English, English-Canadians, Scotch, native-parentage Americans, and foreign-parentage children over ten. West of the river, these are mostly American-born children of foreigners, better designated “second-generation immigrants,” while east of the river, genuine Americans lead irregular lives. The Irish receive separate recognition due to their political importance, and Negroes, many from Kentucky, are native-born. Bohemians are numerous in the southwest, and Russians and Poles are closely related, uniformly Jewish. Germans include Hungarians and Austrians, with other classifications for Italians, Swiss, French, French Canadians, Greeks, Syrians, Chinese, Arabians, and Turks. Eighteen nations appear in total. Italians pack Ewing and Polk Streets, Russian and Polish Jews cluster near the Ghetto’s edge, Bohemians occupy better streets, and the Irish concentrate on Forquer Street. Italians, Jews, and Bohemians lead in numbers, but the Irish control the polls. On the map, the English-speaking are placed next to the street-front, with the Irish behind them, followed by Bohemians, while Italians, Russians, and Poles occupy the rear. Italians and Jews are invariably in rear tenements, and when either arrives, other tenants depart—like cheap money driving out dearer coins.
The Sweating-System and Inside Shops
The discussion of the sweating-system begins with a description of inside clothing shops, where the same division of labor prevails as in smaller shops: after cutting, the garment goes to the operator, then to the buttonholer, finisher, and presser. In inside shops, the presser is usually also a skilled cleaner, removing grease and soils from garments returned from sweaters’ shops. Formerly, operators were “all around workers,” but sweater competition introduced hand-girls who work with each operator doing hand-finishing. The sweating-system has affected disastrously inside-shop employees, since demands for higher wages or shorter hours are met by transferring work to sweaters. Only cutters remain secure from this competition. The examiner receives finished garments from both inside hands and sweaters, and must painfully find and destroy vermin commonly infesting returned garments. Children are not considerably employed in inside shops, and employees are usually English-speaking, though few native Americans remain in the garment trades. Employee organizations are feeble except the cutters’ union, and wages in the best inside shops are far below well-organized trades and steadily falling.
Manufacturers and Outside Work
With two exceptions, every Chicago garment manufacturer gives out clothing for tenement-house production. Three variations exist: manufacturers who closed inside shops retaining only cutting-rooms, manufacturers retaining inside shops who give out garments both ways, and manufacturers requiring day employees to take garments home at night and on Saturday for Sunday work. Every manufacturer keeps a list of outside workers’ names and addresses, required by law to show inspectors on demand. Inspectors report that conditions for night and Sunday work from inside shops differ not a jot from tenement-house shops. A recent night inspection found a garment maker in a tenement dwelling behind a factory, occupying a kitchen and two bedrooms with his wife and four indescribably filthy children. The farther bedroom contained a bed, machine, one chair, a reeking lamp, and two men, with the unmade bed holding two overcoats, two hats, bed-covers, and nine fine tan-color capes trimmed with ecru lace. The dwelling crawled with vermin, and the capes were not free from it. Manufacturers hold outside workers responsible for returning goods, but they do not hold themselves responsible for outside workers’ dealings with their victims, disclaiming moral responsibility to victims and to the purchasing public for disease carried in garments.
The Sweaters and Their Shops
More than a thousand sweater shops have been inspected, with over eight hundred licensed by the city, yet these numbers fall far below the total. Perfect lists are impossible since a man may be an operator today, a sweater next week, move in the night to avoid rent, and return as an inside-shop operator by season’s end. Sweaters differ from cutters in having no organization and being incapable of organized demands for standard prices. They are separated by religion, nationality, language, and location, and as individuals they haggle with manufacturers, undercutting each other and tyrannizing their victims. No association of sweaters exists in Chicago, and there is no standard price for any garment. With every style change, prices change, always downward. Manufacturers concentrate work into the shortest possible season for quick capital turn-over and because long-unemployed sweaters will take work on any terms. This concentration pressures contractors for the speediest return, forcing victims to work far into the night, disregarding Sunday and holidays. Persistent prosecutions of sweaters employing children under fourteen have partly broken up the practice, with boys found with backs crooked for life from continuous heavy machine work. Sweaters are found in all parts of the city, of nine nationalities, speaking nine languages. In the Nineteenth Ward, sweaters are Russian Jews and Bohemians, with home finishers exclusively Italians. There are 162 shops, without exception in tenement houses or rear buildings facing alleys, usually unpaved and noxious with garbage.
Wage-Earning Children and the Law
The Illinois Workshop and Factories Act prohibits the employment of any child under fourteen years in manufacturing establishments, factories, or workshops. Employers must keep a register recording the name, birthplace, age, and place of residence of every person employed under sixteen years, and hiring children between fourteen and sixteen requires an affidavit from a parent or guardian. The factory inspector may demand a certificate of physical fitness for children appearing physically unable to perform their labor. Section 5 limits female employment in factories or workshops to eight hours per day or forty-eight hours per week, and Section 6 requires employers to post printed notices stating work hours. After the law took effect September 1, several hundred children under fourteen were removed from factories, with daily reports forwarded to the compulsory department of the Board of Education. Before the 1893 law, children obtained work permits on mere statement of child or parent, leading to false statements and hundreds of children found in factories who should have been in school. The number of children employed between fourteen and sixteen is somewhat reduced, and no employer in Chicago now wittingly hires a child under fourteen.
The Working Child of the Nineteenth Ward
The Nineteenth Ward is the best district in Illinois for studying child-labor because it contains many factories employing children and is home to wage-earning children in all lines of activity. The Ewing Street Italian colony supplies many bootblacks and newsboys—lads leaving home at 2:30 a.m. for the first edition of the morning paper, selling each edition, filling intervals with blacking boots and tossing pennies, then gathering in the Polk Street Night-School in winter to doze or torment the teacher. These newsboys and bootblacks are ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed, illiterate, and untrained, and the only useful thing they learn is rapid calculation of small sums in making change.
Grinders’ Phthisis and the Cutlery Trade
The narrative turns to the specific dangers of the cutlery trade, noting that the type of grinding performed by a boy in the nineteenth ward has been prohibited for minors in England since 1863 due to the prevalence of grinders’ phthisis among those who begin the work young. The text observes that no boy, however free from individual disabilities, can grow up strong in this trade, because no State officer can require the basic sanitary measures—whitewashed walls or ventilation with suction pipes for withdrawing steel and bone dust—that English inspectors enforce even in cutleries employing only adults.
Joseph Poderovsky and Bennie Kelman
The narrative introduces Joseph Poderovsky, a fourteen-year-old found by a deputy inspector running a heavy buttonhole machine by foot-power in Michael Freeman’s shop. Examined and pronounced rachitic with double lateral curvature of the spine, he was ordered discharged and prohibited from tailor-shop work. Days later, he was found at the same machine. A warrant was sworn for the employer’s arrest, but the man left the State before it could be served. The boy’s father was in comfortable circumstances, with two adult able-bodied brothers, making his employment purely a matter of exploitation. The narrative then turns to Bennie Kelman, a Russian Jew four years in Chicago, found running a heavy sewing-machine in a knee-pants sweat-shop. Medical examination revealed a severe rupture, stemming from an injury he had sustained at thirteen while lifting heavy iron in a boiler factory. Nothing had been done for him; no one in his family spoke English, and he could not read English letters. He was sent to the College of Physicians and Surgeons for treatment and forbidden to work.
The Failure of Health Certificates
The text argues that if health certificates are granted merely pro forma, the law’s object is nullified. A physician appreciating the law’s humane intent will visit the factory to see working conditions. Otherwise, certificates may work positive injury, as with a healthy child wanting to enter a cracker bakery, where dwarfish boys roast before ovens amid unguarded belting and shafting. Similar dangers exist in tobacco, picture-frame, box, metal-stamping, and wood-working factories. The case of Annie Cihlar illustrates the abuse: a delicate-looking girl working in a badly ventilated tailor-shop, found to have rachitis, spinal curvature, and to be below standard weight. The employer was notified to discharge her, but days later she was found working, with the contractor producing a certificate on a physician’s prescription blank declaring her in a “physiological condition.” A test case was made; the judge declared the certificate void and fined the employer. The child then obtained another certificate claiming she was healthy and well-developed, though noting a tendency to draw the spine to one side. The sweater declined to re-engage her until the inspector approved; the inspector refused.
Danger of Mutilation and Death
If a certificate formally meets the law’s requirement, the child must remain at work regardless of health effects, and Illinois law has no provision for safeguarding machinery. In a stamping-factory, the inspector required health certificates for every minor; a week later twenty-five proper certificates were on file—one already superfluous, as that boy had been killed the day before. Within two years, two boys were killed outright and several mutilated there. The last boy killed had lost three fingers months earlier. One machine uses an endless chain over melted solder; boys with iron pokers keep cans moving, risking their hands in the melting fluid. They wrap their hands, but this only helps minor burns. A self-actor machine exists but is expensive; the company finds it cheaper to use the old machine and risk damage suits. The trade is unorganized, and the company employs recently immigrated Russian and Bohemian men, boys, and girls, many wholly illiterate, unable to read English contracts or the card of directions each carries, which lets the company prove notice of danger was given. The company’s fourteen rules, including Rule 11 forbidding employees from placing hands under dies, protect the company’s pockets. Other corporations hold contracts with parents and casualty insurance companies releasing employers from liability—evidence that accidents are numerous and costly. In factories where accidents are almost daily, the excuse that “they never get hurt till they get careless” aggravates rather than excuses the crime, for being care-free is a prerogative of childhood.
Migration of the Children and Candy Factory Inspections
The migratory method disposes of the argument that child labor affords industrial education. Places where children learn trades are the exception; places building fortunes by employing them in droves are where most work. What the child learns is instability, unthrift, and trifling with opportunity. Inspections of a candy factory illustrate this: on August 23, 1893, 80 children under sixteen were found, with 17 sent home; on September 8, 71 children were present, 70 of them a new lot; three days later, 119 children were found, another lot of affidavits. The manufacturer now aims to employ only girls over sixteen, but cannot get them at the wages offered.
The Economics of Child Labor
In trades employing children, the busiest factory was often the one employing the fewest adults. Generally, the industries of Illinois have no inherent need for the characteristic qualities of children; children are employed more due to family poverty than technical requirements. Everything done by children under sixteen could be done as swiftly by young people aged sixteen to eighteen. The child-labor question in Illinois is primarily a question of the wages of fathers in unorganized trades, and secondarily a consequence of the premature disablement of men who would normally support the children. Where a trade is well organized, few children are found working. Trades in the hands of women are never strongly organized; women neither keep children out of shops nor demand wholesome conditions. This is conspicuously true in the garment trades, where women and children outnumber men by two to one, with longer hours, inferior sanitary conditions, and disproportionate work. If no child under sixteen were employed, there would be a marked difference in certain trades, but it is doubtful there would be a perceptible rise in wages due to the lack of organization among girls aged sixteen to twenty who compete with the children. Children should be removed from the labor market for their own sake, more than for the effect on adults. If prohibition of child labor is a humanitarian measure, provision must be made so children do not suffer worse hardship. Wages for children range from 40 cents to $4.00 a week, taking all 6,576 children together. When a child is withdrawn from work, an older sibling may step in, but this compensation does not always happen in the same family. The author suggests scholarships in upper-grade grammar schools and manual-training schools, similar to university scholarships, as a solution. This would be cheaper than caring for consumptive young grinders, cripples from stamping-works, or families of those superannuated at thirty-five. The key to the child-labor question is enforcing school attendance to age sixteen and granting ample help to the poorest working children, making public schools truly schools of the people. Only when every child is known to be in school can there be security against tenement-house labor. Needed legislation includes: a minimum age for work fixed at sixteen; compulsory school attendance to the same age; factory inspectors and truant officers, both men and women, with adequate salaries and expenses, to remove children from workplaces and place them in school; and ample school accommodations, with State money for orphans, half-orphans, and children of the unemployed. Wage-earning children are an unmitigated injury to themselves, to the community, and to the trade they demoralize. They learn nothing valuable, shorten the average trade life, and lower the standard of living of competing adults. A bibliography of child-labor sources is provided, including reports from the U.S. Commissioner of Labor, Massachusetts District Police, and various authors.
Receipts and Expenditures of Cloakmakers
This section, based on material collected during a three-month residence at Hull-House, compares the finances of cloakmakers in Chicago and New York. Information was obtained at first-hand from unions, a tour of sweat-shops, and assistance from leading workingmen. For New York, computations were made on 150 schedules. The regular weekly wage previous to 1893 was $11.65, falling in 1893-1894 to $4.92. The regular yearly income of a family of 4.4 persons fell from $323.07 to $127.92. Twenty-six percent of cloakmakers increased their income by taking lodgers or other methods, their regular yearly income falling from $455.19 to $260.04. For 1893-1894, average yearly individual income was $29.12, and weekly was 56 cents. Months in the working year were 6.4, with daily hours of work reported at 12.3, though the New York Union Secretary states average daily hours in the season is more than sixteen. Cost of living for a family of 4.4 included food at $291.20 yearly, clothing at $56.24, and rent at $123.72, with an average of 2.7 rooms. The percentage of total income spent on rent rose from 38% previous to 1893 to 96% during 1893-1894. Of 150 persons scheduled, 67% reported indebtedness. For Chicago, Mr. Abram Bisno, a cloakmaker for ten years and a State deputy factory inspector, made averages on the wage record-books of 250 cloakmakers in his union. Yearly incomes for machine-workers ranged from $408 to $450, averaging near $430, while hand-workers earned between $300 and $350, averaging near $325. Girls employed in the trade earn $6.50.
Indebtedness and Rents in Chicago
Mr. Ehrenpreis of the Chicago Cutters’ Union states that among Chicago garment workers “every man is in debt,” owing the grocer, butcher, and generally the pawn-shop too. The pawnbroker in Chicago is described as far worse than in New York, attributed to lack of proper legislation. A case observed by a Hull House resident during winter 1893-1894 involved a loan of $25 on household furniture drawing $2 weekly interest; when Hull House bought up the mortgage, $42 had already been paid for slightly over four months’ use of $25—interest at 416 percent yearly. Those familiar with Chicago garment workers agree that even 52 percent in debt is too small a figure. Single men in Chicago have not resorted to cutting under family men in wages as in New York; their yearly income is practically the same as married men’s, but living costs are much less. Single men typically pay $3.95 weekly for board and lodging, plus $50 for clothing, totaling $255.44 yearly living expenses. Against a single man’s yearly income of $330.42, this leaves a credit balance of $74.98. For a Chicago family of 4.77 persons, weekly food and clothing costs are $7.15, plus monthly rent of $8.47, totaling $37.07 monthly. Comparing yearly expenditure with average yearly income of $330.42 shows the Chicago cloakmaker bankrupt by $114.
The Ghetto’s Conclusion and the Bohemian Colony
The evils of the Ghetto, the author concludes, can be generalized under two heads: the environment—wretched houses, narrow streets, and the conditions of employment—over which the Jewish residents have little control, and the conservatism of the majority of the population. This conservatism, however, is being slowly undermined by social and educational forces, as well as minor influences that counteract the use of jargon in papers, conversation, Talmud schools, business, and political organizations. The public schools are not doing enough; illiteracy will prevail as long as the municipal conscience slumbers. The greatest need of the Ghetto is its annihilation, and the forces working for good within it are tending to exterminate it. Some of the brightest minds are leaving the community as they advance in professional circles, taking positions as lawyers, physicians, in the daily press, and in business. The Jewish Training-School prepares the coming generation for broader fields of industrial activity; the Maxwell Street Settlement enlarges social life and consciousness; the socialists teach social responsibility. Native Jewish qualities—love of home, seriousness, and ambition—are antagonistic to the existing conditions. It remains to be seen whether external forces will teach him to expand his personal and social horizon or lead him to draw within his shell. The passage quotes, “The poverty of the poor is their destruction.” The annihilation of the Ghetto means wealth to the Jew—the wealth of Jesus and Ruskin, which is life. The responsibility is not altogether or chiefly his; the qualities he possesses under the distressing environment would enable any man to be free were opportunity free. If the versatile, tenacious Jew leads us to apprehend this, we may find that even social “salvation is of the Jews.”
The Bohemian People in Chicago
The neighborhood of Hull-House was once the Prague of the Bohemian people in Chicago. The district from Canal to Halsted, and from Ewing to Twelfth Street, was the largest and best Bohemian settlement before the great fire of 1870. After the fire, the city extended westward; Bohemians, who love nature, pure air, and gardens, sold their property and moved to new regions to invest in land and have gardens. The whole community changed location, growing into a vast colony spreading from Halsted to Ashland Avenue and from Sixteenth to Twentieth Street, numbering at least forty-five thousand. The colony was named Pilzen (or Pilsen), after the second largest city of Bohemia. It grew too small during the highest tide of Bohemian emigration in 1884-1885. Chicago now has an estimated sixty to seventy thousand Bohemians, containing the third largest city of Bohemians in the world. A new settlement is forming west of Douglas Park.
The first Bohemian emigrants came to Chicago in 1851 and 1852, possibly earlier. After the revolution in 1848, patriotic young men forced to flee their fatherland sought homes in this country. These earlier emigrants included cultivated, energetic men who loved liberty, often found doing menial service like street-sweeping and cigarmaking; graduates of the University of Prague worked for $2.50 to $4.00 per week. Emigration increased after every Continental war, especially after the Austro-Italian wars of the ’60s, when artisans and peasants also began emigrating. People were tired of wars that sapped the nation’s blood, wasted fields, and added tax burdens. Causes of Bohemian emigration include social and political upheavals, exaggerated stories of American wealth, and self-preservation. A chief cause now is military law, which drives a steady stream of strong, healthy men into the country. Bohemia has never sent her “slums,” as some politicians assert, because her slums are too contented in their indolence and filth to move. Austrian money is depreciated; it takes about one thousand gulden to move a family of eight to America.
Good artisans often worked for low wages, even $1.25 a day, but saved to buy a house and lot. After paying for it, they added a story and rented it out. Eventually, the garden was sacrificed for an imposing brick or stone building with a store or more rooms. The landlord moved into the best part of the house, added Brussels carpets, upholstered chairs, and a piano or violin. In early days, rent was high and flour ten dollars a barrel, but cheap meat was four cents a pound and coffee twelve cents. Some early settlers now own property worth fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars. The passage lists reports from five Bohemian building and loan associations (out of forty or more) from 1885 to 1893: “Borivoj” paid $107,795.74; “Our” paid $121,224.34; “Bohemia” paid $78,370.00; “Domov” paid $80,247.47; “Slavic” paid $306,454.24; total $694,092.09. It is estimated these societies have disbursed over four millions of dollars in the last eight years, all invested in property by working-people. Before 1878, most Bohemians were in building-trades (carpenters, bricklayers, painters), tailors, or ordinary laborers in lumber-yards. After 1878, they entered stores, law offices, and other businesses; today they are in every profession. Most are artisans; only some peasants are ordinary laborers. Bohemian business-men command respect for their honesty and integrity; “bad debt” among them is rare.
Bohemian Societies, Citizenship, and Politics
The passage describes Bohemian freethinkers who, after entering public schools, maintain separate halls, theatres, and societies. When priests refused to baptize, marry, or bury society members, the freethinkers separated entirely and now have their own cemetery. There are one hundred and sixty societies, all with benevolent objects such as paying death-benefits and supporting schools. Additionally, there are eleven singing and dramatic clubs. These clubs give several plays during the season, donating the proceeds to good causes. There is great rivalry among the amateur actors, who attempt Shakespeare’s or Sardou’s dramas. The freethinkers publish three daily newspapers and seven weeklies, contributing to a total of sixteen Bohemian newspapers in Chicago.
In 1860, Bohemian-Slavonian young men organized a Lincoln Rifle Company, the first regiment from Chicago to fight for the Union. The best monument in the Bohemian cemetery commemorates these early immigrants’ patriotism. Fellow-countrymen gather yearly with flowers and addresses to honor their fallen brethren. Almost all old settlers before and after the war were Republicans. After 1880, some voted the Democratic ticket. In 1883, the Democratic party nominated a Bohemian for alderman, gaining its first real hold on the people. This was a calculated move by Democratic wire-pullers to win the Bohemian vote. It succeeded; today, out of twelve thousand Bohemian votes, eight thousand are Democratic. Politicians incite the people against the other party as bitter enemies, and if that fails, they deliberately buy votes. They then raise a “Pharisaic cry” about the ignorance and corruption of foreign voters. The author argues that since everything in the old country has its price, foreigners believe the same is true here. Americans are to blame, as the better class of citizens who preach about corruption never approach these foreign voters, never attend their political clubs, and draw their estimates from the untrustworthy newspapers, condemning them as hopeless.
Bohemian citizens have been represented as alderman, county commissioner, school-board member, public-library board member, corporation counsel, assessor, and in the State legislature. About one hundred and fifty Bohemians are employed in city government. Since 1874, there has been a Bohemian department in the Public Library, now numbering four thousand books. The Bohemian Republican League publishes a politico-economic journal called the American Citizen. Many younger politicians are cultured, Americanized men interested in social and economic questions. Bohemians are called “clannish.” The author asks who is to blame. Early on, it was natural to settle near kinsmen. Their Slavonic language was unlike any other, disadvantaging them compared to Germans, whose language is allied to English. Germans, as traditional enemies, disparaged them, so the Bohemian began to regard all non-Bohemians as enemies. The American press is also blamed, heaping insult or flattery during campaigns. The author states that while we shouldn’t cater to foreigners at the cost of truth, we shouldn’t let prejudices undermine the republic. Left alone, foreigners are divided by petty hatreds, but constant baiting by the press gives them one bond of sympathy: hatred of Americans. So far, Bohemians are free of such feeling and Americanize too rapidly, with second and third generations not speaking their native language. Their leaders want their contribution to be pure and healthy.
Remarks upon the Italian Colony in Chicago
Italians do not come to America to find a home, but to repair financial conditions or make money, intending to return to Italy. If they remain, it is due to unforeseen circumstances. They are classified as temporary immigrants at embarkation but often become permanent. They mortgage their homes, not sell them, to pay for passage, dreaming of a return. They leave family behind, promising to send money. After some years, they send for their families and settle permanently, sometimes becoming citizens but always remaining Italians. Their American-born children will always be “incorrigible” Italians due to their distinct individuality and Italian names. They impose sacrifices, limiting personal expenses to hasten a moneyed return. Their objectionable way of living in tenements is ascribed to this extreme economy. The author specifies he writes of the peasant class, particularly from Southern Italy, making honorable exceptions.
Italian immigrants are regarded as unskilled laborers, employed in building railroads and earthwork. They find work only part of the year, remaining idle in towns during winter, sometimes working as snow and street sweepers. Many leave for Italy for Christmas and return in March or April. This last year, due to financial conditions, the exodus of Italians has been great, partly due to low passage prices from competition. The author defends Italians from the “unskilled laborer” classification. In America they could be good farmers, vine-growers, gardeners, olive and fruit growers, and stock-farmers, as they were in Italy. They do not continue this work, however. Inducing them to farm land in a congenial climate would be fortunate. Their instinct for picking would then have decent sway, instead of picking rags, cigar-stumps, bones, and filth from alleys and ash boxes. This picking instinct is notable, as in Italy they pick wood, weeds, wheat, fruit, insects, herbs, and beans. The only means for regeneration is to send them to farming; all other means are palliatives. They would then become first producers, the backbone of the country. The Italians of Chicago number 25,000, mostly peasants.
Italian Political Action and the Cook County Charities
L’Italia, the leading Italian newspaper of Chicago, began with its first issue a crusade against ragpicking and sending boys and girls into the streets.
The Settlement’s Dual Mission
The passage concludes its meditation on art and labor by contrasting the lives of the rich and the poor. The rich man’s son, surrounded by plate glass, lace curtains, and fine clothes, does not necessarily live an artistic life. The author invokes Carlyle’s Past and Present to argue that the life of the poor is too painful and the life of the rich too vulgar. Both are marked by a “haggard despair,” whether it be the despair of the cotton-factory operative or the “brutish, God-forgetting, Profit-and-loss Philosophy” of the capitalist. Only a small, impractical few save civilization from being less handsome than a vacuum. For the children of both the degraded poor and the degraded rich, there is no artistic hope outside a miracle.
The one remaining hope is a new, freed life. Whoever hopes to help art survive must feed the hungry, but must also free the art-power of the whole nation by enabling people to work in gladness rather than woe. It is a feeble imagination to hold fair things before chained hands that cannot grasp them. The soul of man in the commercial and industrial struggle is under siege, and while passing in sustaining things is merciful, the effectual thing is raising the siege. A settlement true to its ideal must work toward the rescue of those bound under the slavery of commerce and the wage-law, discourage wasting human life making valueless things, and urge a state without cruel contrasts of surfeit and want. By holding art as the right of all, a settlement should help build a social state that supplants the “incredible and impious warfare of the children of God.” Whatever joy ennobles, whatever things bless, let us live this life and think on our brothers, for without them we cannot live it. When all have this joy, speech will be sweet and handiwork fair, and this will be art. If gladness ceases and the earth becomes a prison-house, art will die.
The Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement
Jane Addams begins her essay by noting that one man or group sometimes reveals a higher conscience by incorporating into deed what was before merely a philosophic proposition. John Burns’s loyalty to the East London dockers’ strike exemplified this, as “the injury to one” became “the concern of all.” A settlement accepts the ethics of its contemporaries, sharing the life of the poor to understand and better it. By its locality, it sees the stress of those bearing social injury, and propinquity is an unceasing factor.
Hull-House sits in the sweaters’ district of Chicago. After five years of observing the totally disorganized sewing-trades, the residents discovered that lack of organization tends to industrial helplessness. In industrial affairs, isolation is a social crime entailing starvation and moral disintegration. No trades are so overcrowded as the sewing-trades; the needle is the refuge of unskilled women, and wages are lowest there. The Italian widow finishing cheapest goods from six in the morning until eleven at night cannot earn a living wage. The Hebrew tailor must put his little children to work sewing buttons. Women accepting lower wages for family reasons commit unwitting crimes against fellow-workers. Woman must supplement family conscience with social and industrial conscience.
The settlement must pledge itself to industrial organization. The labor movement is a concerted effort for equitable distribution of product and orderly existence. Trades-unions tell workers to associate and become a solid body, the only way to prevent wage cuts and regulate hours. Of two women’s unions organized at Hull-House and four holding meetings there, only one is filled with the new spirit. The shirtmakers organized in spring 1891 after a cut from twenty-five to twelve cents per dozen for collars and cuffs; the strike failed, but the union thrived and secured national labels. The cloakmakers organized in spring 1892 amid falling wages. The men—Russian-Jewish tailors, ill-dressed and grimy—were skilled workers, while the American-Irish girls were well-dressed and at ease. The residents felt a deeper gulf existed between these men and girls than between favored and unfavored classes. Working-people are being forced into social democracy by economic pressure.
The Complexity of the Labor Movement
The labor movement is not as simple as trades-unionism. A settlement encounters devoted men who want better industrial organization but insist it must be part of a general reorganization of society. Individualists argue that equal distribution cannot be secured until there is equality of opportunity, demanding the removal of all State and city franchises and privileges so competition is absolutely free. The individualist works for the recall of franchise and special privilege. Socialists present the opposite view, reading Karl Marx and seeing a gradual, inevitable absorption of all means of production by the community. The scientific socialist sees the concentration of capital and the growth of trusts as an inevitable transition to the socialistic state. Many shades of opinion exist between these two views. The imagination in America has been seized in turn by the minister, the soldier, and the lawyer, but it is now the turn of the economist. The crucial question of the time is: “In what attitude stand ye toward the present industrial system?” The settlement must face the industrial problem as a test of its sincerity.
The labor movement has been given preponderating force by negative action. Unions use power to frustrate the capitalist, such as in a railroad strike. A movement cannot be carried on by negating other acts; it must have a positive force. A moral revolution cannot be accomplished by men held together merely by a sense of injury. Men thus animated may organize for resistance and destroy, but they cannot build up. The labor movement in America bears this trace of immaturity. Men who work excessively and face enforced idleness are too far from regulated life for moral principle. The workingman over-estimates wealth, leisure, and education. The settlement may take a larger and steadier view than the workingman or the capitalist.
A century ago there was an impulse for a share in political life. Now there is a similar demand for a share in the results of industry. Mazzini was the prophet of political democracy, and Arnold Toynbee is called the prophet of the second development, interpreting democracy into industrial affairs. Carlyle pleaded for the rich to govern and protect the poor, but the workers dreamed of standing by the employer as free citizens. Toynbee asks who was right, and replies the people were right. Democracy did save industry, transforming disputes about wages from social feuds into business bargains. It is singular that in America the capitalist has been slow to treat with a “walking delegate.” We must learn to trust democracy. When the English people demanded the charter, the nobility predicted wild measures, as the capitalist now assumes higher wages will be spent in saloons. There is a failure to count the sobering effect of responsibility.
There is a tendency among workingmen leaders to yield to individual ambition. The poor man has proverbially been the tyrant of poor men when rich. The organization of society into two hostile camps turns us back into class warfare. Life teaches that right and wrong are most confusedly mixed. The labor movement may cease to divide all men into capitalists and proletarians. George Eliot reminds us that we later learn to take the steep highway of tolerance and self-blame. Leaders may catch the larger ethical view. In raising the mass, men could have a motive-power greater than for individual success. The passage hopes that older trades-unions, recognizing a solidarity of labor, will later perceive the larger solidarity which includes labor and capital. In the summer of 1894, the Chicago unions of Russian-Jewish cloakmakers, German compositors, and Bohemian and Polish butchers struck in sympathy with the American Railway Union. This event prefigures a time when no factory child in Chicago can be overworked without protest from all good citizens. The settlement is not affrighted by men “Groping for the right, with horny, calloused hands, / And staring round for God with bloodshot eyes.” But the settlement should be affrighted when the groping is not for the right, but for overturning; when the staring is for Mammon.
The Settlement’s Duty Against Class Warfare
A settlement may be dismayed when it sees workingmen apathetic to higher motives, thinking only of stratagems to outwit capitalists, or justifying base measures by claiming they learned such lessons from the other side. Such an attitude turns the movement from a development into a struggle, leaving force as the sole judge between adversaries. Class interests become the governing and motive power, and the settlement can logically be of no value to either side. Its sympathies are entangled in such a struggle, but to be of value it must keep its judgment clear as to the final ethical outcome.
Every action may be analyzed into permanent and transient aspects. The transient aspect of the strike is anger and opposition against the employer, and often the chagrin of failure. The permanent aspect is the binding together of strikers in ties of association and brotherhood, and the attainment of a more democratic relation to the employer. Because of a growing sense of brotherhood and democracy in the labor movement, we see in it a growing ethical power. The duty of the settlement in keeping the movement from becoming class warfare is clear. There is a temperamental bitterness among workingmen, but they cannot afford to cherish class bitterness if the labor movement is to be held to its highest possibilities. A class working for a class against another class implies trades working for trades and individuals working for individuals. The universal character of the movement is gone from the start and cannot be caught until an all-embracing ideal is accepted.
A recent writer has noted that the position of the power-holding classes is being undermined by the disintegrating influence of the immense fund of altruistic feeling with which society has become equipped. Within this fund of altruism is the motive force slowly enfranchising all classes and insisting upon equality of condition and opportunity. If this explanation is accepted, the labor movement is at bottom an ethical movement and a manifestation of the orderly development of the race. The settlement is pledged to insist upon the unity of life, to gather to itself the sense of righteousness in its neighborhood and city, and to work toward betterment not of one kind or class of people but for the common good. Just as men deprived of comradeship go back to brutality, so any class deprived of the companionship of the whole becomes decivilized and crippled. No part of society can afford to get along without the others.
The settlement urges: first, the organization of working people to secure leisure and orderly life for higher aims; second, constant effort to bring to bear upon the labor movement a consciousness of its historic development; and lastly, it accentuates the ultimate ethical aims of the movement. The despair of the labor movement is, as Mazzini said in another cause, that we have torn the great and beautiful ensign of Democracy. Each party has snatched a rag of it and parades it as if it were the whole flag, repudiating the others. This disdain of any class is dangerous to the labor movement, making it a class-measure and substituting party enthusiasm for the irresistible force of human progress. The labor movement must include all men in its hopes and have the communion of universal fellowship. Any drop of gall within its cup is fatal. All sense of injury must fall away and be absorbed in the consciousness of a common brotherhood.
Main Arguments
The book’s central argument, articulated in the prefatory note and map notes, is that immediate, firsthand observation of urban conditions is essential for social reform. The residents of Hull-House offered their maps and papers as recorded observations of value because they were immediate and the result of long acquaintance. The insistent probing into the poor’s lives would be unjustifiable if statistics were too inconsiderable for improvement; the searchlight of inquiry must be steady, for spasmodic curiosity is ineffectual. Minute investigation’s painful nature would be unpardonable were it not for the conviction that public conscience, when roused, must demand better surroundings for the most inert citizens. Stating symptoms to ascertain disease and apply cure is scientific and humanitarian.
Florence Kelley’s essays argue that the sweating-system is disastrous for both workers and the public. The system has affected disastrously inside-shop employees, since demands for higher wages or shorter hours are met by transferring work to sweaters. Manufacturers disclaim moral responsibility to victims and to the purchasing public for disease carried in garments. The concentration of work into the shortest possible season serves two purposes: quick capital turn-over, and the sinister fact that long-unemployed sweaters will take work on any terms. Kelley argues that rigid eight-hour law enforcement will compel sweaters to increase employees, enlarge shops, and create groups too strong to submit to conditions imposed on ten or a dozen poor people.
On child labor, Kelley argues that the industries of Illinois have no inherent need for the characteristic qualities of children; children are employed more due to family poverty than technical requirements. Everything done by children under sixteen could be done as swiftly by young people aged sixteen to eighteen. The child-labor question in Illinois is primarily a question of the wages of fathers in unorganized trades, and secondarily a consequence of the premature disablement of men who would normally support the children. Where a trade is well organized, few children are found working. Trades in the hands of women are never strongly organized; women neither keep children out of shops nor demand wholesome conditions. Children should be removed from the labor market for their own sake, more than for the effect on adults. Wage-earning children are an unmitigated injury to themselves, to the community, and to the trade they demoralize; they learn nothing valuable, shorten the average trade life, and lower the standard of living of competing adults.
The key to the child-labor question, Kelley argues, is enforcing school attendance to age sixteen and granting ample help to the poorest working children, making public schools truly schools of the people. Only when every child is known to be in school can there be security against tenement-house labor. She recommends scholarships in upper-grade grammar schools and manual-training schools, similar to university scholarships, as cheaper than caring for consumptive young grinders, cripples from stamping-works, or families of those superannuated at thirty-five.
Zeublin’s essay on the Ghetto argues that the greatest need of the Ghetto is its annihilation; the forces working for good in it are tending to exterminate it. The evils of the Ghetto are generalized under two heads: the environment over which the Jews have little control, and the conservatism of the majority of the population. The public schools are not doing enough; illiteracy will prevail as long as the municipal conscience slumbers. The responsibility is not altogether or chiefly the Jew’s; the qualities he possesses under the distressing environment would enable any man to be free were opportunity free.
Zeman’s essay on the Bohemians argues that Americans are to blame for foreign voters’ corruption. Since everything in the old country has its price, foreigners believe the same is true here. The better class of citizens who preach about corruption never approach these foreign voters, never attend their political clubs, and draw their estimates from untrustworthy newspapers, condemning them as hopeless. Left alone, foreigners are divided by petty hatreds, but constant baiting by the press gives them one bond of sympathy: hatred of Americans.
Mastro-Valerio argues that Italians do not come to America to find a home but to make money and return to Italy. Their objectionable way of living in tenements is ascribed to extreme economy. The only means for regeneration is to send them to farming; all other means are palliatives. They would then become first producers, the backbone of the country.
Key Concepts
The settlement ideal is the book’s founding concept: a group of university men and women residing in a poor quarter to influence the people toward better local government and a wider social and intellectual life. The residents of Hull-House embodied this ideal, directing their energies not toward sociological investigation but toward constructive work.
The wage map, adapted from Charles Booth’s London maps, is the book’s methodological innovation. The colors in Booth’s wage maps of London were retained, and the maps put into graphic form facts about the section of Chicago immediately east of the House. The map of nationalities classified the district’s inhabitants into eighteen nations, distinguishing groups forming different social and industrial elements.
The sweating-system is the book’s central industrial concept: the practice of contracting garment work out to tenement-house shops, where sweaters employed workers under conditions of extreme exploitation. More than a thousand sweater shops had been inspected, over eight hundred licensed by the city, yet these numbers fell far below the total. Sweaters were separated by religion, nationality, language, and location, incapable of organized demands for standard prices.
The Ghetto, both greater and lesser, is described as a distinct physical and social entity on Chicago’s West Side. The greater Ghetto included about a square mile, perhaps 70,000 population, with about 20,000 Jews. The lesser Ghetto was in the seventh ward, where nine-tenths of 15,000-16,000 were Jews. The Ghetto’s institutions—the synagogue, the Chevras, the Jewish Training School, the Maxwell Street Settlement—constituted a complete social world.
The cash-child is a specific category of child labor: children employed in retail stores to run cash and packages between counters and wrapping desks. The pneumatic tube had begun to supersede cash-children in more respectable retail stores, but on the West Side, young girls were employed thirteen hours a day throughout the week, fifteen on Saturday.
The intermittent husband is Lathrop’s term for the “masculine expedient of temporary disappearance” in non-employment or domestic complexity—men who left their families during hard times, a phenomenon flourishing among all save Italians.
The Jewish Training School represents the concept of industrial education as a remedy for the persecuted Jew’s chief deficiency: lack of industrial adaptability. The school, opened October 1890, seated eight hundred in twenty-two rooms, with machine-shop, joining-shop, moulding, drawing, sewing, kindergarten rooms, and physical and chemical laboratories.
The Maxwell Street Settlement, established at a prominent Jewish rabbi’s suggestion, demonstrated faith that with removal of native-land despotism, the Russian Jew’s ambition and tenacity would make him a splendid American, unless he fell victim to commercialism’s despotism.
Themes
The relationship between environment and character is the book’s deepest theme. The residents repeatedly show how physical conditions—filthy tenements, unpaved alleys, unventilated workshops—shape the lives and possibilities of the district’s inhabitants. The poorest tiny wooden houses offer nothing compared to the hideousness inside the larger, higher tenements; smart frontage is a mere screen for individual houses and the street as a whole. Rear tenements and alleys form the core of the district where the densest crowds of the most wretched congregate. The passage describes filthy tenements, dingy courts, tumble-down sheds, foul stables, broken sewer-pipes, garbage piles alive with diseased odors, and children filling every nook. Yet the book also shows the limits of environmental determinism: the Jews’ conservatism, the Italians’ sojourner mentality, the Bohemians’ love of gardens all persist despite or against their surroundings.
The theme of immigration and Americanization runs throughout. The book examines how different national groups—Jews, Bohemians, Italians, Irish, Germans, Scandinavians—adapt to American conditions. The map of nationalities shows the district’s ethnic mosaic, with Italians packing Ewing and Polk Streets, Russian and Polish Jews clustering near the Ghetto’s edge, Bohemians occupying better streets, and Irish concentrating on Forquer Street. The authors are ambivalent about Americanization: Zeman notes that Bohemians Americanize too rapidly, with second and third generations not speaking their native language, while Mastro-Valerio observes that Italian children will always be “incorrigible” Italians due to their distinct individuality and Italian names.
The theme of economic exploitation is pervasive. The sweating-system, child labor, low wages, and high rents combine to keep the district’s workers in poverty. The statistics on cloakmakers’ incomes—falling from $11.65 weekly to $4.92 in 1893-1894—and the case of the $25 loan drawing $2 weekly interest (416 percent yearly) illustrate the economic pressures on working families. The book shows how the unorganized state of certain trades, particularly those employing women and children, perpetuates exploitation.
The theme of social responsibility is central to the book’s purpose. The residents believed that public conscience, when roused, must demand better surroundings for the most inert citizens. The book is an attempt to rouse that conscience through facts. The authors repeatedly call for action: legislation to protect children, enforcement of factory laws, compulsory school attendance, agricultural settlement for Italians, annihilation of the Ghetto.
The theme of the home as a social center appears in Zeublin’s discussion of Jewish family life. The home is the great social centre; children remain devoted to home even after losing parental religion. Maintaining old family life is almost impossible under the factory system with its division of labor, long hours, and women’s employment; the astonishing fact is preservation of family tradition despite modern social disintegration.
The theme of charity and its limits emerges in Lathrop’s essay on the Cook County Charities. The county is the “dernier ressort” for the district’s population, private charity being exhausted before county aid is sought. The institutions at Dunning—the infirmary and insane asylum—represent society’s response to those who have fallen through the cracks.
The Author’s Conclusions
The book concludes with Julia Lathrop’s essay on the Cook County Charities, which examines the county institutions serving as the last resort for the district’s population. The infirmary at Dunning, just across the city limits northwest, averaged about 1,500 inmates, with an insane asylum housing 800-1,000. The infirmary statistics for 1893 showed 5,051 admissions, of whom 3,560 were foreign-born, with Ireland contributing 1,457, Germany 727, England 299, Sweden 202, Canada 183, Scotland 135, Norway 116, Poland 80, Bohemia 53, Austria 61, Denmark 53, Switzerland 41, Italy 40, Russia 37, France 28, and Holland 23, with the balance from thirteen countries.
The physical conditions of the infirmary were relatively good: a great brick building, well-lighted wards, steam-heated, clean, with a grass plat with trees and flower-beds and a separate maternity ward. Little work was required of inmates; hired attendants served in every ward, with a supervisor over men and a supervisoress over women, and one superintendent over both institutions. Inmates did laundry, ward, bakery, dining-room, and sewing-room work, and the farm of 160 acres used inmates. But there were no shops, no industries; clothing was usual cotton; there was no common sitting-room, few books or papers; men played cards on beds and received a tobacco allowance.
The most striking statistic was the disparity between men and women in the infirmary. In January 1894, there were 1,455 men and 606 women; in 1893, 1,156 men and 380 women; in 1892, 1,108 men and 321 women; in 1891, 1,021 men and 409 women. From January 1893 to January 1894, the male population increased by 299 (nearly 25 percent), while the female population increased by only 10 (a little over 4 percent)—the effect of the depression winter on the district’s male population.
The book’s final message, implicit in Lathrop’s statistics and explicit in the earlier essays, is that the conditions of urban poverty are not natural or inevitable but the product of specific economic and social arrangements that can be changed through investigation, legislation, and organized effort. The residents of Hull-House offered their maps and papers not as exhaustive treatises but as recorded observations that might be of value because they were immediate and the result of long acquaintance, hoping to stimulate inquiry and action rather than to recommend their own methods.
Significance
Hull-House Maps and Papers occupies a foundational place in American sociology and social reform. It was one of the first American works to apply Charles Booth’s methods of empirical social investigation to an American city, adapting his wage maps to Chicago conditions. The book’s combination of statistical analysis, cartographic representation, and firsthand observation established a model for subsequent social surveys, influencing the development of the Chicago School of sociology and the broader Progressive-era reform movement.
The book is also significant for its demonstration of the settlement house as a site of social research. The residents of Hull-House were not detached academic observers but engaged reformers who used investigation as a tool for change. Their insistence that immediate, firsthand observation was essential to understanding urban conditions challenged the armchair theorizing of much contemporary social commentary.
The book’s documentation of conditions in the Nineteenth Ward provides an invaluable historical record of immigrant life in late-nineteenth-century Chicago. The detailed descriptions of the sweating-system, child labor, the Ghetto, the Bohemian colony, the Italian colony, and the county charities capture a world that was rapidly changing. The maps preserve the ethnic and economic geography of the district at a specific moment, allowing later scholars to trace patterns of settlement and mobility.
The book’s influence extended to specific reform campaigns. Florence Kelley’s documentation of child labor and the sweating-system supported the movement for factory legislation in Illinois. The book’s recommendations—minimum age for work fixed at sixteen, compulsory school attendance to the same age, factory inspectors and truant officers with adequate salaries, ample school accommodations—anticipated the child labor reforms of the Progressive era. The discussion of the Jewish Training School and the Maxwell Street Settlement influenced the development of social services in immigrant communities.
The book is also significant for its collaborative authorship. Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, Isabel Eaton, Charles Zeublin, Josefa Humpal Zeman, Alessandro Mastro-Valerio, and Agnes Sinclair Holbrook were all residents of Hull-House, and their essays represent different perspectives on the same neighborhood. The book thus embodies the settlement ideal of learning from and with the poor, rather than simply studying them from above.
Finally, the book is significant for its moral vision. The residents of Hull-House believed that public conscience, when roused, must demand better surroundings for the most inert citizens. Their conviction that stating symptoms to ascertain disease and apply cure is scientific and humanitarian informed their approach to social reform. The book’s closing image—the infirmary at Dunning filling with unemployed men during the winter of 1893-1894—remains a powerful reminder of the human costs of economic depression and the inadequacy of charitable institutions to address systemic poverty. The book’s enduring significance lies in its demonstration that careful, systematic investigation of social conditions is a necessary precondition for effective reform, and that the searchlight of inquiry must be steady, for spasmodic curiosity is ineffectual.
