Nurturing lives
At a time when immigrants were feared, Chicago’s Hull House provided educational and social support to the foreign-born
On a Saturday night in 1890, a Tribune reporter went to a party at an address, as she noted, not generally visited by society columnists. It was held at a mansion at 335 S. Halsted St. (the house number was later changed to 800), once home to a prominent businessman, Charles Hull. More recently, the second floor had been cut up into flats for immigrant families, impoverished and often not English-speaking, unlike their neighbors.
The previous year, the property had been rented by a woman of means, Jane Addams, and friend, Ellen Starr, for an experiment that would make Hull House the birthplace of the social work profession.
On their behalf, the editor of L’ Italia, an Italian-language newspaper, had issued invitations to an open house at the newly renovated mansion. One envelope was addressed to:
Mr. Agathno Harbaro
Fruit Store, East Polk street Between the Alley and State street
The enclosed invitation, the Tribune noted, said Addams and Starr “were of a distinguished family and they had come to live among these children of Italy and desired their friendship.”
Harbaro brought his whole family. So, too, did Giovanni Vecchi, Valentino Riggio, and a whole host of peddlers, street cleaners and fruit dealers. “I never saw anything like it,” the Tribune reporter wrote. “Here was a simple emigrant people invited to spend a social evening with cultivated Americans and enjoying it.”
One of the hostesses wanted to put to rest any suggestion that immigrants were fundamentally different from cultured people.
“Society people!” Starr said. “We are all society people.”
She had two Italian babies on her lap and was sitting among guests wearing peasant costumes and fanciful scarves from Rome or Florence.
The evening’s convivial atmosphere was remarkable, considering the different worlds from which the guests and hosts had come. Their guests could scarcely imagine the bucolic countryside of northern Illinois where Addams and Starr grew up.
In her autobiography, “Twenty Years at Hull-House,” Addams recalled an Italian woman thinking that the red roses at a Hull House reception were imported from Italy.
“She would not believe for an instant that they had been grown in America,” Addams wrote. “She said that she had lived in Chicago for six years and had never seen any roses, whereas in Italy she had seen them every summer in great profusion.”
Of course, roses could be seen in Chicago — in a lakefront park or a florist shop in an affluent part of town. But not amid the wall-to-wall tenements of the immigrant woman’s world.
Addams and Starr moved into Hull House because they didn’t want to live among the rich who got to see roses that were invisible to the poor. But they didn’t take a vow of poverty. They wanted the less fortunate to taste the fruits of affluence they themselves had inherited.
“These young women believe that all luxury is a right that can be and is shared,” the Tribune reporter observed. “They have taken their books, pictures, learning, gentle manners, esthetic taste — all — down to South Halsted Street. This is how they are shared.”
Monday evenings, young women in a club were reading “Romola,” their understanding of George Eliot’s historical novel enhanced by pictures of Florence at the mansion.
Tuesday afternoons, members of the Schoolboys’ Club practiced reading aloud with books from Hull House’s circulating library.
Wednesday evenings, the Workingmen’s Discussion Club heard speakers on topics like unions, the movement for an eighthour workday and child labor regulations.
“Hull House provided social and educational support to Chicago’s immigrant poor and dispossessed at a time when class struggle threatened to tear Chicago apart,” a Tribune guest commentary said in 2012, the year the beloved institution closed its doors and filed for bankruptcy. “In that environment, Addams and Starr fostered personal interaction at Hull House between the rich, middle class and the poor.”
From Addams’ perspective, she wasn’t just giving charity to others. She was getting something she’d been searching for since graduating college eight years earlier: a fulfilling vocation.
She long knew she wanted to help the downtrodden. At just shy of 5 years old, she was startled to see her father, a state senator, cry openly when his friend President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. “The greatest man in the world has died,” her father explained.
Initially she thought that being a doctor would allow her to follow the example of the Great Emancipator. But a congenital spinal deformity forced her to drop out of the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia.
After six months in a hospital bed, and profoundly depressed, she took the advice of a physician who prescribed a change of scenery. With her stepmother, she went on the first of several tours of Europe.
In England, she was fascinated by the story of Arnold Toynbee, an Oxford don who spent summer vacations in Whitechapel, a notorious London slum. An economic historian and social reformer, he wanted to know, firsthand, how the poor lived.
Toynbee was dead by then, but in his memory Toynbee Hall had been established — a “settlement house” ministering to society’s outcasts. It was a clue to the life
Addams was seeking.
“I gradually reached a conviction that the first generation of college women had taken their learning too quickly,” Addams recalled in her autobiography, “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 shared her excitement with Starr, whom she met at Rockford College, and they resolved to create their own Toynbee Hall in Chicago. Like its precursor, Hull House didn’t just attend to the material deprivation of its neighbors.
Toynbee Hall mounted an annual exhibit of famous paintings borrowed from London’s museums and collectors. Similarly, Hull House provided music lessons and recitals, theatrical performances and college-extension classes.
The 1890 open house featured a sonata for violin and piano, and arias from Gounod’s opera “Romeo and Juliet,” with “(Maestro) Valerio acting as a music-rack for Romeo,” the Tribune reporter observed. “The audience applauded heartily but judiciously.”
Yet Addams’ feeling for the finer things in life didn’t keep her from getting her hands dirty. She had herself appointed garbage inspector of the 19th Ward. Refuse collection wasn’t a priority of the alderman, but it was a necessity in a neighborhood where children played in littered streets and swam in the nearby Chicago River.
Addams encouraged the immigrants to practice their traditional handicrafts. Hull House hosted an exhibition of the spinning and weaving techniques of their former homelands. That was all the more remarkable at a time when old-stock Americans feared that an invasive species was spreading foreign ways.
Quickly Addams was not only accepted by the neighborhood but also became the recognized arbiter of its disputes. In 1903, Chicago’s Greek and Bulgarian communities were at loggerheads over which one was entitled to speak for the Macedonians who were still under Turkish rule. She invited both sides to Hull House, where a shouting match broke out.
“Gentlemen, be calm, I beg of you,” Addams said. “This meeting has been called, so let it take place.”
The Tribune reported the 1903 encounter under the headline “Balkan War Cloud Here.”
Subsequently she tried to be a peacemaker in Europe.
When World War I broke out in 1914, she led an effort to have neutral nations, which then included the United States, call upon the belligerents to lay down their arms. It failed, and the U.S. joined the conflict. But Addams was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize that made her a pariah to ultranationalist Americans. “I probably never shall be applauded again” at another meeting, she predicted.
Instead, she continued to receive the speaking invitations that had come her way as word of Hull House spread. It was famed for being a women’s collaborative. Other reform-minded women (and a few men) had joined Addams and Starr in living there.
But after each of her travels in support of social justice, women’s rights and peace, she returned to Hull House. She did so in 1935, after an operation at Passavant Hospital that couldn’t save her from cancer.
After her death, she lay in state in Hull House, where 1,000 people an hour passed her casket. Her honor guard was composed of successful businessmen and professionals who, as street urchins, had been nurtured at Hull House. Standing alongside them were young members of the Boys Club.
One of the first in line was Anna Williams, a 63-year-old African American woman. Blind in one eye, she had helped out at Hull House since its founding.
“My best friend is gone,” she sobbed. “I was with Miss Addams since I was 15 years old, and I’ll be seeing her again in a few years.”
Most of those who came to the funeral “were poor folk, dressed in their Sunday best, to whom Miss Addams had been a benefactor for so long,” the Tribune reported. “There was a cab driver and a hunch backed girl. There was an old man who wiped his eyes with a red bandana as he passed the body. Young girls, their rouge gone awry with tears; solemn faced boys … were in the line.”
The crowd of those who couldn’t get in stretched for blocks down Halsted Street. “The Greek, Mexican, and Italian businesses were hung in purple crape or purple paper ribbons,” the Tribune noted.
Inside Hull House, there was a simple service. It concluded with a clergyman quoting something Addams had said at the funeral of a friend of hers: “The sorrow which follows a death such as this can have no bitterness about it.”