Twenty Years at Hull House

The first building constructed for Hull-House contained an art gallery, illuminated for day and night use. Mr. and Mrs. Barnett of Toynbee Hall lent the first exhibit of pictures to Hull-House in 1891, connecting it with the pioneer English effort to provide working people with exposure to the best art. The art exhibits at Hull-House were well-attended, surprising one neighborhood resident who had believed that Americans cared only for money, not art. The loan exhibits at Hull-House continued for several years until the Chicago Art Institute was opened free to the public on Sunday afternoons. Art studios were organized at Hull-House from the beginning under the direction of Enella Benedict, a resident on the Chicago Art Institute faculty. Artists painted picturesque immigrant neighborhoods and taught classes to talented youth and older people eager for self-expression. Within the first decade at Hull-House, a workshop was opened by several residents who belonged to the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society. The Settlement regularly saw young people rushed in their factory work; in contrast, the Hull-House shop offered “restorative power in the exercise of a genuine craft” (260). Starr, who had trained in bookbinding in England and who had promoted art at Hull-House, taught a few apprentices design and workmanship at her Settlement bindery.

Hull-House gave winter music concerts and the Hull-House Music School, which opened in 1893, offered classes in music. In all the industrial quarters, immigrants attended the theater, with especially long lines for Sunday matinees. Before there were film regulations for 5¢ theaters, Hull-House successfully established a moving picture show to try to improve the standards, but then decided it was more important to assist the Juvenile Protective Association in regulating all films. Addams, however, acknowledges the constructive power of drama as well: expressing what “we have not been able to formulate for ourselves” and warming us “with a sense of companionship with the experiences of others” (268). Amateur dramatic companies at Hull-House presented plays ranging from melodrama to Shaw and Ibsen. On the Hull-House stage, immigrants received expert help in staging classics in ancient Greek drama or their own depictions of immigrant experience. Addams remembers viewing the Passion Play at Oberammergau in 1900. The peasants’ portrayal of Jesus’ life conveyed certain moral truths more clearly to her than preaching did as Addams saw Jesus as a reformer threatening the moneyed interests.

Often, different types of Hull-House artists united for a project such as a play, with musicians, writers, designers. However, Addams depicts the effort to beautify Hull-House with murals on the theater walls as leading to divisions. Even the residents split into different camps over which heroes should be portrayed, after their unity on Lincoln and Tolstoy. They finally compromised with landscape scenes.

Hull-House was unfairly criticized for its perceived defense of Russian anarchists. Earlier, American citizens were deeply touched by Russian revolutionists’ message of martyrdom to advance human progress against the autocratic Russian government. When the most distinguished Russian revolutionist, Prince Kropotkin, visited Chicago in 1899 to lecture, he stayed at Hull-House. He had been listened to with respect on his American tour. At Hull-House, he had addressed the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society. He also spoke at the state universities of Illinois and Wisconsin and at leading Chicago organizations. However, in 1901, following the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist, Hull-House was attacked by a daily newspaper for having hosted Kropotkin, a kindly scholar who had always identified himself as an “anarchist.” In the panic after the president’s death, anyone suspected of anarchy was arrested in Chicago in the belief that a widespread plot would be discovered. An editor of an anarchistic newspaper was among those arrested and not allowed to see a lawyer. Addams had met the quiet, scholarly editor when he had visited Kropotkin at Hull-House. When the editor’s friends begged Addams for help, she stated that in the American legally constituted society, the editor would have rights before the law. They retorted that this was in theory; in fact, the editor was being held without bail although nothing could be proved against him. Addams appealed to the Chicago mayor that it must be demonstrated that the law is impartial. The political mayor insisted the editor was being held to protect him from a lynching. He offered Addams the chance to visit the editor in prison on a humanitarian errand. Although Addams had often interviewed prisoners, she returned to Hull-House after her visit to a swarm of reporters and strong public criticism. Despite many accusatory letters, she did receive a constitutional law professor’s praise for upholding the law in a time of panic.

Addams points out that no one studied whether sporadic acts of violence against a democratic government were the result of discouraged, unassimilated immigrants or the result of anarchistic teachings. She became convinced that interrupting isolation through human fellowship will deter some violence. An old German cobbler told her about his own similar experience and wished he had used his chance meeting with the assassin to deter him.

Six years later, a young Russian Jewish immigrant named Averbuch was mistakenly shot at the Chicago police chief’s home because he was assumed to be an anarchist intent on assassination. Hull-House wanted a thorough examination of the facts before a final opinion was formed. The Chicago police used drastic search methods in the Russian Jewish neighborhood already traumatized by anti-Semitic police violence in their country of origin. Addams felt that the Averbuch affair was an opportunity to demonstrate to the Russian Jewish immigrants the guarantee of constitutional rights in America and the difference between the U.S. government and the Russian government. Every Settlement held citizenship classes in which the principles of American institutions were explained, but the actual treatment the immigrants received made their constitutional rights unclear or confused. Many Russian immigrants feared the Averbuch incident was only a prelude to the use of the extradition treaty to terrorize young Russians the city perceived as volatile. Addams did not believe in the use of force to achieve justice outside the regular channels of established government despite possibly noble motives.

When Russian writer and social reformer Maxim Gorky visited America, different committees of Russian immigrants visited Addams, pleading with her to secure a newspaper statement that the tsar’s agents had generated a scandal about Gorky’s private life to thwart his attempt to publicize the plight of the Russian working and peasant classes. Addams approached a newspaper to present a balanced perspective, but the editor refused and only offered to publish an article written and signed by Addams. She did not want to defend Gorky’s loosening of marital bonds, which was part of his program, so she declined. Several months later, Addams was shocked that the incident was distorted to give a negative portrayal of her character: Hull-House encountered opposition when it expressed support of the 1905 Russian Revolution.

Instructing people in a Settlement required different methods, such as the diffusion of information in a social atmosphere. At Hull-House, they held College Extension classes (which preceded the University of Chicago’s Extension classes), supplying instruction on various subjects. The faculty’s relation to the students was similar to that of host and guest. One of the primary social events of the season was the reception that Hull-House residents gave at the end of each term for the students and faculty. In addition, a Hull-House summer school was held at Rockford College for a decade, generously made possible by the college trustees. One hundred women and a small group of men attended the summer school for six weeks. There were outdoor classes in botany and bird watching, courses in literature, and boat excursions on the river, reproducing the comradeship of college life. Faculty and students only paid $3 a week, and Hull-House only had to purchase food. This simple, effective undertaking could be reproduced at the many colleges set in lovely surroundings, which were unused during the summer.

On Thursday evenings during Hull-House’s first years, Hull-House became an early University of Chicago Extension center. Hull-House’s Bowen Hall seated 750: on Sunday evenings during the winter, it was filled with male audiences attending illustrated lectures on history, astronomy, and other subjects given by University of Chicago. A member of the Hull-House Boys’ Club was unjustly arrested as a suspected thief and detained at the police station; he endured the unfair treatment by recalling a lecture Addams had given on Jean Valjean, the unjustly accused protagonist of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables. Hull-House residents emphasized the inspiration and solace of literature, such as in the Shakespeare Club, where scholars and actors gave interpretations, or in Lathrop’s Plato Club. Addams sought to “feed the mind of the worker […] and to connect it with the larger world” (299). Dr. John Dewey gave a lecture series on “Social Psychology.”

Although Hull-House helped exceptional young people leave their childhood neighborhoods to attend college, the residents also felt that a Settlement’s primary educational effort should not promote a culture that separated socioeconomic classes based on education. Hundreds of the immigrants attended Hull-House classes to learn the English language. Knowledge of English could mean the difference between an opportunity to work in a factory or unemployment. Hull-House also gave classes in cooking, dressmaking, and millinery for domestic training as well as for apprentices to shorten their trade training. A trustee gave the Hull-House Boys’ Club a building with well-equipped shops for work in wood, iron, brass, copper, tin, photography, printing, telegraphy, and electrical construction. In classes taught by workingmen, the boys discovered their aptitudes and preferences for future jobs.

Other Hull-House Boys’ Club members wanted recreational opportunities, so the Settlement offered supervised billiards tournaments and dances. Popular classes were given in the Hull-House gymnasium and athletic contests were held on Saturday evenings.

Many people inquired over the years about the religious stance of Hull-House residents. The residents could not hold a joint religious service because they were of diverse faiths: Jews, Catholics, English Churchmen, Dissenters, and agnostics. Addams recognized “that this diversity of creed was part of the situation in American settlements, as it was our task to live in a neighborhood of many nationalities and faiths” (308), so it was better that the Settlement residents also represented varying religious faiths. The Settlement’s function manifested “through the reaction on its consciousness of its own experiences” (308). The Settlement did limit itself to one political party or economic school. Most of the Hull-House residents had widely differing interests and tastes, and supported themselves by their professional occupations, including doctors, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, and artists, in Chicago, giving their leisure time to Settlement activities. Each resident paid his own expenses, and they cooperatively shared the kitchen and dining room. Hull-House eventually had 13 buildings heated and lit from a central plant. The Settlement’s goal was to socialize democracy.