Twenty Years at Hull House quotes

“Yes, please, Uncle James,” would be my meek reply. He fortunately never explored my motives, nor do I remember that my father ever did, so that in all probability my machinations have been safe from public knowledge until this hour.

It is hard to account for the manifestations of a child’s adoring affection, so emotional, so irrational, so tangled with the affairs of the imagination.

I simply could not endure the thought that “strange people” should know that my handsome father owned this homely little girl.

We had of course our favorite places and trees and birds and flowers.

It is hard to reproduce the companionship which children establish with nature, but certainly it is much too unconscious and intimate to come under the head of aesthetic appreciation or anything of the sort.

When we said that the purple windflowers—the anemone patens—“looked as if the winds had made them,” we thought much more of the fact that they were wind-born than that they were beautiful:

… my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon enough.

Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.

They too wish to climb steep stairs and to eat their bread with tears, and they imagine that the problems of existence which so press upon them in pensive moments would be less insoluble in the light of these great happenings.

… which the moral life of his countrymen might flow,” I was gradually able to make a natural connection between this intellectual penetration at Oxford and the moral perception which is always necessary for the discovery of new methods by which to minister to human needs.

In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

Gradually a healing sense of well-being enveloped me and a quick remorse for my blindness, as I realized that no one among his own countrymen had been able to interpret Lincoln’s greatness more nobly than this Oxford scholar had done, and that vision and wisdom …

At any rate here it is for the entertainment of the reader if not for his edification:

“So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in sleep, we find it difficult to have any experience at all.”

We did not, however, tamely accept such a state of affairs, for we made various and restless attempts to break through this dull obtuseness.

When Professor Blaisdell returned to his college, he left in my hands a small copy of “The Crito.” The Greek was too hard for me, and I was speedily driven to Jowett’s translation.

That old-fashioned habit of presenting favorite books to eager young people, although it degenerated into the absurdity of “friendship’s offerings,” had much to be said for it, when it indicated the wellsprings of literature from which the donor himself had drawn waters of healing and inspiration.

Throughout our school years, we were always keenly conscious of the growing development of Rockford Seminary into a college.

… the final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the street, and clutching forward for food which was already unfit to eat.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

I have never since been able to see a number of hands held upward, even when they are moving rhythmically in a calisthenic exercise, or when they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them in eager response to a teacher’s query, without …

we are bewildered that the world should be going on as usual and unable to determine which is real, the inner pang or the outward seeming.

In time all huge London came to seem unreal save the poverty in its East End.

During the following two years on the continent, while I was irresistibly drawn to the poorer quarters of each city, nothing among the beggars of South Italy nor among the salt miners of Austria carried with it the same conviction of human wretchedness which was …

… he also bears with him the consciousness that he had given himself over so many years to classic learning—that when suddenly called upon for a quick decision in the world of life and death, he had been able to act only through a literary suggestion.

This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes.

It seemed to me too preposterous that in my first view of the horror of East London I should have recalled De Quincey’s literary description of the literary suggestion which had once paralyzed him.

I might enjoy half an hour’s practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed!

I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages.

It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.”

I might enjoy half an hour’s practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages.

It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.

”

… suddenly made quite clear to me that I was lulling my conscience by a dreamer’s scheme, that a mere paper reform had become a defense for continued idleness, and that I was making it a raison d’être for going on indefinitely with study and travel.

It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.

Nothing less than the moral reaction following the experience at a bullfight had been able to reveal to me that so far from following in the wake of a chariot of philanthropic fire, I had been tied to the tail of the veriest oxcart of …

I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the everlasting “preparation for life,” however ill-prepared I might be.

It was not until years afterward that I came upon Tolstoy’s phrase “the snare of preparation,” which he insists we spread before the feet of young people, hopelessly entangling them in a curious inactivity at the very period of life when they are longing to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideals.

I am not so sure that we succeeded in our endeavors “to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society and to add the social function to democracy.”

But Hull House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives a form of expression that has peculiar value.

In our search for a vicinity in which to settle we went about with the officers of the compulsory education department, with city missionaries, and with the newspaper reporters whom I recall as a much older set of men than one ordinarily associates with that …

In time it came to seem natural to all of us that the Settlement should be there.

If it is natural to feed the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving for social intercourse that all men feel.

Whoever does it is rewarded by something which, if not gratitude, is at least spontaneous and vital and lacks that irksome sense of obligation with which a substantial benefit is too often acknowledged.

In addition to the neighbors who responded to the receptions and classes, we found those who were too battered and oppressed to care for them.

To these, however, was left that susceptibility to the bare offices of humanity which raises such offices into a bond of fellowship.

From the first it seemed understood that we were ready to perform the humblest neighborhood services. We were asked to wash the newborn babies, and to prepare the dead for burial, to nurse the sick, and to “mind the children.”

We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and glimpses of that long life of our ancestors, which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries.

Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of enjoyment as the persistent keeping away from the great opportunities for helpfulness and a continual ignoring of the starvation struggle which makes up the life of at least half the race.

To shut one’s self away from that half of the race life is to shut one’s self away from the most vital part of it;

They have been shut off from the common labor by which they live which is a great source of moral and physical health.

They feel a fatal want of harmony between their theory and their lives, a lack of coordination between thought and action.

I think it is hard for us to realize how seriously many of them are taking to the notion of human brotherhood, how eagerly they long to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal.

Society smiles at it indulgently instead of making it of value to itself. The wrong to them begins even farther back, when we restrain the first childish desires for “doing good,” and tell them that they must wait until they are older and better fitted.

We intimate that social obligation begins at a fixed date, forgetting that it begins at birth itself.

We treat them as children who, with strong-growing limbs, are allowed to use their legs but not their arms, or whose legs are daily carefully exercised that after a while their arms may be put to high use.

Others not content with that, go on studying and go back to college for their second degrees; not that they are especially fond of study, but because they want something definite to do, and their powers have been trained in the direction of mental accumulation.

Many are buried beneath this mental accumulation with lowered vitality and discontent.

Walter Besant says they have had the vision that Peter had when he saw the great sheet let down from heaven, wherein was neither clean nor unclean. He calls it the sense of humanity.

which regarded man as at once the organ and the object of revelation; and by this process came about the wonderful fellowship, the true democracy of the early Church, that so captivates the imagination. The early Christians were preeminently nonresistant.

They believed in love as a cosmic force.

There was no iconoclasm during the minor peace of the Church. They did not yet denounce nor tear down temples, nor preach the end of the world.

They grew to a mighty number, but it never occurred to them, either in their weakness or in their strength, to regard other men for an instant as their foes or as aliens.

The spectacle of the Christians loving all men was the most astounding Rome had ever seen.

They were eager to sacrifice themselves for the weak, for children, and for the aged; they identified themselves with slaves and did not avoid the plague; they longed to share the common lot that they might receive the constant revelation.

first, the desire to interpret democracy in social terms; secondly, the impulse beating at the very source of our lives, urging us to aid in the race progress; and, thirdly, the Christian movement toward humanitarianism.

It is difficult to analyze a living thing; the analysis is at best imperfect.

Many more motives may blend with the three trends; possibly the desire for a new form of social success due to the nicety of imagination, which refuses worldly pleasures unmixed with the joys of self-sacrifice;

It must be hospitable and ready for experiment. It should demand from its residents a scientific patience in the accumulation of facts and the steady holding of their sympathies as one of the best instruments for that accumulation.

It must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.

Its residents must be emptied of all conceit of opinion and all self-assertion, and ready to arouse and interpret the public opinion of their neighborhood.

but it assumes that this overaccumulation and destitution is most sorely felt in the things that pertain to social and educational privileges. From its very nature it can stand for no political or social propaganda.

It must, in a sense, give the warm welcome of an inn to all such propaganda, if perchance one of them be found an angel.

The only thing to be dreaded in the Settlement is that it lose its flexibility, its power of quick adaptation, its readiness to change its methods as its environment may demand.

The Hull House students and club members supped together in little groups or held their reunions and social banquets, as, to a certain extent, did organizations from all parts of the town.

The experience of the coffeehouse taught us not to hold to preconceived ideas of what the neighborhood ought to have, but to keep ourselves in readiness to modify and adapt our undertakings as we discovered those things which the neighborhood was ready to accept.

Better food was doubtless needed, but more attractive and safer places for social gatherings were also needed, and the neighborhood was ready for one and not for the other.

… the men lest they fail to provide for the family dependent upon their daily exertions, at moments seemed to us the secret stores of strength from which society is fed, the invisible array of passion and feeling which are the surest protectors of the world.

We fatuously hoped that we might pluck from the human tragedy itself a consciousness of a common destiny which should bring its own healing, that we might extract from life’s very misfortunes a power of cooperation which should be effective against them.

Of course there was always present the harrowing consciousness of the difference in economic condition between ourselves and our neighbors.

Mr. Lloyd and I agreed that the fiery old man presented as fine a spectacle of devotion to a lost cause as either of us had ever seen, although we both possessed memories well stored with such romantic attachments.

And yet this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the face of the earth.

Five years later in the same Hull House hall in which the cooperative congress was held, an Italian senator told a large audience of his fellow countrymen of the successful system of cooperative banks in north Italy and of their cooperative methods of selling produce …

… I served as a juror in the Paris Exposition of 1900, nothing in the entire display in the department of Social Economy was so imposing as the building housing the exhibit, which had been erected by cooperative trades-unions without the assistance of a single contractor.

And so one’s faith is kept alive as one occasionally meets a realized ideal of better human relations.

At least traces of successful cooperation are found even in individualistic America.

It constantly acts between the various institutions of the city and the people for whose benefit these institutions were erected. The hospitals, the county agencies, and State asylums are often but vague rumors to the people who need them most.

Another function of the Settlement to its neighborhood resembles that of the big brother whose mere presence on the playground protects the little one from bullies.

We early learned to know the children of hard-driven mothers who went out to work all day, sometimes leaving the little things in the casual care of a neighbor, but often locking them into their tenement rooms.

Our early day nursery brought us into natural relations with the poorest women of the neighborhood, many of whom were bearing the burden of dissolute and incompetent husbands in addition to the support of their children.

Some of them presented an impressive manifestation of that miracle of affection which outlives abuse, neglect, and crime⁠—the affection which cannot be plucked from the heart where it has lived, although it may serve only to torture and torment.

“Has your husband come back?” you inquire of Mrs. S., whom you have known for eight years as an overworked woman bringing her three delicate children every morning to the nursery;

The overworked, sorrow-stricken woman looked up and replied,

“If you could give me my wages for tomorrow, I would not go to work in the factory at all. I would like to stay at home all day and hold the baby. Goosie was always asking me to take him and I never had any time.”

This statement revealed the condition of many nursery mothers who are obliged to forego the joys and solaces which belong to even the most poverty-stricken.

I once saw her receive this complimentary verdict—“this ribbon to stick in her coat”—with such dignity and gravity that the words of condolence for her financial disappointment, died upon my lips.

These indomitable souls are but three out of many whom I might instance to prove that those who are handicapped in the race for life’s goods, sometimes play a magnificent trick upon the jade, life herself, by ceasing to know whether or not they possess any of her tawdry goods and chattels.

… where men who differed widely in their social theories might meet for discussion, where representatives of the various economic schools might modify each other, and at least learn tolerance and the futility of endeavoring to convince all the world of the truth of one position.

Fanaticism is engendered only when men, finding no contradiction to their theories, at last believe that the very universe lends itself as an exemplification of one point of view.

“The Working People’s Social Science Club” was organized at Hull House in the spring of 1890 by an English workingman, and for seven years it held a weekly meeting.

those who held that “business is business” and who were therefore annoyed at the very notion of social control, and the radicals, who claimed that nothing could be done to really moralize the industrial situation until society should be reorganized.

A Settlement is above all a place for enthusiasms, a spot to which those who have a passion for the equalization of human joys and opportunities are early attracted.

It is this type of mind which is in itself so often obnoxious to the man of conquering business faculty, to whom the practical world of affairs seems so supremely rational that he would never vote to change the type of it even if he …

“You are all right now, but, mark my words, when you are subsidized by the millionaires, you will be afraid to talk like this.” The defense of free speech was a sensitive point with me, and

I quickly replied that while I did not intend to be subsidized by millionaires, neither did I propose to be bullied by workingmen, and that I should state my honest opinion without consulting either of them.

To my surprise, the audience of radicals broke into applause, and the discussion turned upon the need of resisting tyranny wherever found, if democratic institutions were to endure.

lest her unutterable longing should at the very end be tinged with bitterness. She must have divined what was in my mind, for at last she said each time after the repetition of my sad news:

“I don’t blame anyone, I am not judging them.”

My heart was comforted and heavy at the same time;

… slowly come to realize that periodical idleness as well as the payment of wages insufficient for maintenance of the manual worker in full industrial and domestic efficiency, stand economically on the same footing with the “sweated” industries, the overwork of women, and employment of children.

But of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment, and it was inevitable that we should see much of it in a neighborhood where low rents attracted the poorly paid worker and many newly arrived immigrants who were first employed in gangs upon railroad extensions and similar undertakings.

The sturdy peasants eager for work were either the victims of the padrone who fleeced them unmercifully, both in securing a place to work and then in supplying them with food, or they became the mere sport of unscrupulous employment agencies.

Why had we never been told? Why had our interest in the remarkable musical ability of his child blinded us to the hidden artistic ability of the father?

We had forgotten that a long-established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament.

There are many examples of touching fidelity to immigrant parents on the part of their grown children;

One instinctively found reasons why it was easier for a Russian than for the rest of us to reach this conclusion; the Russian peasants have a proverb which says: “

Labor is the house that love lives in

,” by which they mean that no two people nor group of people can come into affectionate relations with each other unless they carry on together a mutual task, and when the Russian peasant talks of labor he means labor on the soil, or, to …

The moral of the tale was clear applied to people who lived “where they did not naturally belong,” although

I protested that was exactly what we wanted⁠—to be swallowed and digested, to disappear into the bulk of the people.

Twenty years later I am willing to testify that something of the sort does take place after years of identification with an industrial community.

She came into the club room one evening in time to hear the president call the restive members to order with the statement,

“You might just as well keep quiet for she is bound to finish it, and the quicker she gets to reading, the longer time we’ll have for dancing.”

And yet the same club leader had the pleasure of lending four copies of the drama to four of the members, and one young man almost literally committed the entire play to memory.

no feminine waist lacked an arm save that of the proud chaperon, who sat in the middle smiling upon all. Seeing that the photograph somewhat surprised us, the chaperon stoutly explained,

“This may look queer to you, but there wasn’t one thing about that picnic that wasn’t nice,”

and her statement was a perfectly truthful one.

… ended last December, more than twenty-five thousand young people under the age of twenty-five passed through the Juvenile and Municipal Courts of Chicago—approximately one out of every eighty of the entire population, or one out of every fifty-two of those under twenty-five years of age.

One’s heart aches for these young people caught by the outside glitter of city gayety, who make such a feverish attempt to snatch it for themselves.

The young people in our clubs are comparatively safe, but many instances come to the knowledge of Hull House residents which make us long for the time when the city, through more small parks, municipal gymnasiums, and schoolrooms open for recreation, can guard from disaster …

These mothers apparently understand the sharp demand for social pleasure and do their best to respond to it, although at the same time they constantly minister to all the physical needs of an exigent family of little children.

We often come to a realization of the truth of Walt Whitman’s statement, that one of the surest sources of wisdom is the mother of a large family.

It is but natural, perhaps, that the members of the Hull House Woman’s Club whose prosperity has given them some leisure and a chance to remove their own families to neighborhoods less full of temptations, should have offered their assistance in our attempt to provide …

“To find the inheritance of this poor child His little kingdom of a forced grave.”

It has been pointed out many times that Art lives by devouring her own offspring and the world has come to justify even that sacrifice

, but we are unfortified and unsolaced when we see the children of Art devoured, not by her, but by the uncouth stranger, Modern Industry, who, needlessly ruthless and brutal to her own children, is quickly fatal to the offspring of the gentler mother.

why do we permit the waste of this most precious human faculty, this consummate possession of civilization?

When we fail to provide the vessel in which it may be treasured, it runs out upon the ground and is irretrievably lost.

The universal desire for the portrayal of life lying quite outside of personal experience evinces itself in many forms. One of the conspicuous features of our neighborhood, as of all industrial quarters, is the persistency with which the entire population attends the theater.

All of these young people looked upon an afternoon a week in the gallery of a Halsted Street theater as their one opportunity to see life.

The sort of melodrama they see there has recently been described as “the ten commandments written in red fire.”

Certainly the villain always comes to a violent end, and the young and handsome hero is rewarded by marriage with a beautiful girl, usually the daughter of a millionaire, but after all that is not a portrayal of the morality of the ten commandments any …

The incident is related here as an example of the clever use of that old device which throws upon the radical in religion, in education, and in social reform, the oduim of encouraging “harlots and sinners” and of defending their doctrines.

If the underdog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend him.

The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong;

It is, of course, impossible to say whether these oppositions were inevitable or whether they were indications that Hull House had somehow bungled at its task.

Many times I have been driven to the confession of the blundering Amiel: “It requires ability to make what we seem agree with what we are.”

He was much pleased that these lectures were largely attended by workingmen who ordinarily prefer that an economic subject shall be presented by a partisan, and who are supremely indifferent to examinations and credits.

They also dislike the balancing of pro and con which scholarly instruction implies, and prefer to be “inebriated on raw truth” rather than to sip a carefully prepared draught of knowledge.

Nevertheless Bowen Hall, which seats seven hundred and fifty people, is often none too large to hold the audiences of men who come to Hull House every Sunday evening during the winter to attend the illustrated lectures provided by the faculty of the University of …

… unjustly arrested as an accomplice to a young thief and held in the police station for three days, that during his detention he “had remembered the way Jean Valjean behaved when he was everlastingly pursued by that policeman who was only trying to do right”;

“I kept seeing the pictures in that illustrated lecture you gave about him, and I thought it would be queer if I couldn’t behave well for three days when he had kept it up for years.”

The power of dramatic action may unfortunately be illustrated in other ways.