Jane Addams, Social Settlements, National Conference of Charities and Correction,

Transcription

1 Jane Addams, Social Settlements, National Conference of Charities and Correction, Proceedings, (1897), Jane Addams Memorial Collection, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago: I feel a little apologetic at being here at all. The settlements are accused of doing their charity work very badly. They pretend not to do it at all; and then they become overwhelmed with the poor and the needy, and they do it, not as trained people should do it, but as neighbors do it one for the other, which is not scientifically. In spite of that, however, settlements are, I believe, valuable to charities. I was a little shocked last summer in London by hearing a poor man famous in charity organization work say that, when he got a poor man so far on his feet that he would join a trades-union and a friendly society, he felt like waving his hand to the man, and saying, Good-by, good fellow! I hope never to see you again. You are now out of my reach. That is exactly what the settlement does not do. If a man belongs to the trades-union, with a fair prospect of keeping up his wages, or to a friendly society, with a fair prospect of keep himself from want, then we begin to be very much interested in him as a fellow-being and a fellowcitizen; and between him and us need come none of those perplexing questions of charity. The residents of a settlement should not be ready to say good-by to anybody on the round earth,-i hope, neither to the well-to-dos nor the ne er-do-weels [sic]; and, as a result of this attitude, we do not say good-by to those of our neighbors who are in need of charity of correction, and a good deal of time and a good deal of force in the settlement necessarily goes to them. [end page 338] But, after all, the settlement does stand for something unlike that which the charity visitor

2 stands for. You are bound, when you are doing charitable work, to lay stress upon the industrial virtues. You are bound to tell a man he must be thrifty, in order to keep his family; that his first duty is to keep at work, and support them. You must tell him that he is righteous and a good citizen when he is self-supporting, that he is unrighteous and not a good citizen when he receives aid. You must continually press upon him the need of the industrial virtues, and you have very little time for going out into the broader and more social qualities of life. Now the settlement does not ignore, I hope, those virtues; but it does not lay perpetual and continual stress upon them. It sees that a man may, perhaps, be a bit lazy, and still be a good man and an interesting person, who cares for lectures and holds opinions. It sees that a man may sometimes spend a little money in the saloon and get hold of the ward politicians in a way that a man who saves his money and always stays at home in the evenings cannot possibly do. It does not lay so much stress upon one set of virtues, but views the man in his social aspects. If the individual is the agent for social experience, certainly social life must be the expression of that experience; and we would not want our neighbors to go on thinking only of their own sanctification and caring only for their families, and never entering at all into the larger life which lies all about them. To adjust an individual to civilization as he finds it round him, to get him to the pitch which shall induce him to push up that civilization a little higher,-not thinking all the time that he may lose something of his own caste and standing in the process, not thinking forever of the money side of life,-is perhaps the chief function of a settlement in a neighborhood given over the wearing toil by day and rather lurid pleasures by night. Perhaps the settlement aims to change the social ideal of its neighborhood more than any other one thing. Any one who has lived for a number of years in an industrial neighborhood

3 must be convinced, as Mr. Ely has become convinced, of the set notions of propriety which reign in such a neighborhood. For instance, a woman will almost lose her social standing with the other women of the street if, in case of the death of a child, her mourning is not of a certain kind and quality. It is not that her neighbors are hard-hearted; they feel for her, they realize as perhaps no one else does [end page 339] the sorrow which comes to her; but they insist that conventions must be observed in this direction. Their conventions are so few that they cannot afford to let them go. So they feel that a burial by the county forever ostracizes a family from their midst, for the burial by the county means that the last stand for respectability has been given up; and we are very poor, indeed, if we have not at least one stand of respectability. If a settlement can break through a little of that sort of thing, if they can make it apparent to even a few women that breeding is not displayed by the sort of clothes one wears under any circumstances, but by a gentle bearing through many years of intercourse, then they have done something, perhaps, in setting up a new social standard in family life. Women do not talk much with each other about being gentle to their children. Occasionally, in a shame-faced way, one will say, They really do better, if you re not too hard on them. But they require a certain standard of obedience,-an obedience that shall follow right through, so that the grown child shall bring his wages into the family fund where they are so much needed. Their notions of family intercourse are insensibly shaped by the need of a discipline rigid enough to hold the adult as well as the child. I might take an example of the political standards that are very largely set by a man who gives out offices so that a chance to feed at the public crib is the sole standard of political success. At one time a man in our ward gave out twenty-six hundred places. Such a man

4 positively debauches all the foreigners in that ward, so that it will take two or three generations to give them any notion of government. He lays the foundation of corruption so thoroughly that it is hard to say how we are ever going to get out of it. The settlement tries many methods to give some other idea of civic service. Among other things, Hull House for two years has had one of the residents inspect the alleys of the ward every day, insist that they shall be clean, see that no favor is shown to a man because of his wealth or his political power, and give eight hour s honest work for eight hours pay. Perhaps by some such dramatic representation as that the civic idea is slightly modified. Possibly the thing that needs modification even more than the social ideals of the civic ideals is the ideal of industrial life which prevails. A man goes to his work expecting it to be dull and wretched. He simply draws his breath and shovels coal for ten hours, thinking [end page 340] only of the time when it shall be over. Now there are many of us who believe that a man's work, in and of itself, should bring some joy to him,-that he might at least know where the coal comes from and what is the use of the factory whose power he is feeding; that we have no right to shut off eight or ten hours of our life to dull drudgery, with no mental outlook. If the settlement can bring any historic notion of industrial life, if it can connect the factory even a little with the past and the present, if it can make a man see the transformation of the natural forces, the transformation from the simple tool he used in his boyhood to the machinery which is going on about him, it has done much. He is bound to be shut away from knowledge and the touch of the natural forces. Some such thing as that the settlement tries to do in widening out and opening life. Of course, it has its classes, because the orthodox way is to get people in classes, and teach them something, if you can. Some workingmen are willing to do that; many of them are afraid

5 of being caught. But they will come to a billiard-room, they will come more or less to a coffeehouse, they will come to concerts, they will come to many things which are not set classes for instruction. Perhaps the thing which is most genuine in an industrial neighborhood, the thing which last refuses to give way under the drudgery and the narrowness of life, is the social spirit. Men do like to meet each other, even after they have met each other a great many times and found themselves rather dull, they still keep it up with a patience which is something pathetic. And I suppose it is that which we are all doing when we go to parties and conferences and all sorts of things, for the mere hope that somehow, with somebody, we can have the real intercourse of mind with mind; and, when we do get it in the midst of all our toil and trouble, it is the most refreshing things which life offers. That is exactly what workingmen hope for. Just because their work is such a drudgery, their intellectual outlook is so narrow that lectures on only a few questions really interest them, because their senses are so dulled and tired only music with a real swing or a sensuous appeal interest them much; but they care very much for this social intercourse and refreshment. And all through our neighborhood, as in every neighborhood of workingmen, little societies spring up, sometimes without any formal organization, sometimes social centers connected with a mutual benefit society or a trades- [end page 341] union or old family claims. If the settlement can find out these things which exist, if it can take a group of men in whom the social spirit has survived, and lead them out into something fine and worldwide and awakening, it has done a great service. Last summer I had the pleasure of meeting Count Tolstoi, and ever since I find it very

6 hard to speak without quoting him. He says somewhere that literary men have fallen very largely into the same fault that musicians and painters and other artists have fallen into: they have learned to write for only a limited number of people. For many years, he says, he wrote his novels, knowing perfectly well that the persons who tilled his soil, and who fed him and kept him and his family sheltered and warmed, never read those novels. He was quite content that his peasants should go on taking care of him, and that a few people in London and Paris and New York and St. Petersburg should enjoy his novels. We have done this so long that it has come to pass that music and the other arts minister to only a few people; and we look pityingly upon the great mass of people, and regret that they are so dull and unappreciative. We let them work in our factories and make our shoes and our clothes, we let them till our soil and feed us; but, when it comes to intellectual or artistic life, of course, we say, they have nothing to do with that. Now Tolstoi says, supposing that the first man who learned to draw music from a pipe had so pleased his fellow-workmen that they had said, "We will feed you if you will stay here and give us music, and supposing he had consented to that, and had stayed beside the field and played for them, but that after a while he concluded that his playing was getting so fine that these workingmen ded not appreciate it, and so he had said "Go on working for me and feeding me, but I shall go and play to a more appreciative audience." That is exactly, he says, what we have done. We have taken away the results of our artistic life, or the life of travel and wide intercourse, and we use it for few; and we say to the mass of mankind: "Please go on taking care of us: you do it very well. But do not ask for short hours and do not make too much fuss." The settlement protests against that sort of thing. It says that the music cannot be real, that the painting is only an affectation, unless we do it in the name of and for the mass of men. And so we claim that we are not only bringing back to the industrial army the things which they ought

7 always to have had, but that by bringing them back we are going, in the end, to have better music [end page 342] and painting, better literature and a higher type of social life; that a service is rendered to both ends of society. I should like to say just a little of the change in ideals which comes to the people who live in settlements. It is impossible that you should live in a neighborhood; and constantly meet people with certain ideas and notions, without modifying your own. Perhaps they are not always proportioned, but at least they are honestly changed. Last night, when one of the speakers touched upon early marriages and their evil effect, I reflected that that was the sort of thing which I might perhaps have said five years ago, but which I should be very unwilling to say today. It is quite true that the business man has very little money at twenty-five, and that the professional man is just starting out in his professions, and that, if they wish to marry prudently, they would both much better wait until they are thirty or thirty-five. But the workingman will find work very much easier, and will get better wages when he is twenty-five than when he is thirty-five; and by the time he is forty he is beginning to be laid upon the shelf. The time for him to make his best wages and put his investment in his family - which, in the long run, is the only method of saving that workingmen have - is the time when he is a young man. If he does not do it then, but learns to spend it all on himself, and insensibly raises his standard of living to the requirement of all his wages for himself, he probably will not be a very good family man when he enters upon marriage at thirty or thirty-five. Last Sunday I took dinner with a workingman who makes twenty-five dollars a month. Upon that he supports his father and mother, his wife and his three children, and does it with a certain degree of success. He does not want to save. He does not consider it righteous that he should do anything with his money but take care of his

8 family. He says: "I have no idea of saving money for my children. I leave that for the bourgeoisie. We workingmen invest our money in our children. Just as my father and mother took care of me, I am now taking care of them, and my children will take care of me." Nothing could so induce them to be thrifty as the presence of half a dozen little mouths clamoring for food. They need that form of savings-bank, if I may use the expression. The impulse to save is not then a sense of prudence, but affectionate concern. We make a mistake when we judge them from the business and professional class point of view. [end page 343] There are various other points at which our views are insensibly modified from things which one could not see unless one lived continually with working people. One of these is the view of the unemployed and the evolution of the tramp. Perhaps nothing is more pathetic than the man who is kept out of work through no fault of his own; and often in Chicago, since 1893, it has not been the fault of any one. He first begins to look for work with an enthusiasm which is almost pathetic. He gets discouraged, and looks less and less alertly; and he finally reaches the point where his self-confidence leaves him, and where he gets that devastating belief that there is no place in the world for him. Many men, I believe, desert their families, thinking that there is no need of them either in the family or the community. We all know, as little children, how nothing cut us so much to the heart as to be set aside, and told: "Run away. I am busy. I do not need your help." That is what the community does to such a man. The factories are buzzing, but none of them wants him. Nothing so deteriorates character and so brings out the faculties which make the pauper and the tramp as that sort of thing. You get a new tenderness for the unemployed,-for the man who cannot fit himself into society. A series of half a dozen accidents, happening to almost any one in this room, could bring him to such a position. It is not that he

9 has not often a good mind. It is not that he has not a good trade. Just now Hull House is surrounded by dozens of printers who have been thrown out, owing to the introduction of the linotype. At least one of them whom I think of, though carefully brought up to a good trade, is going down very fast into the drunkard and the casual lodging-house man. This is, I think; the only message which a settlement has for a conference like this,-that they do see people from the point of view of the recipients of the charity which is extended. I do not wish to underestimate the friendly visitor. I often say that the people who constantly visit the poor often know more about them than the people should be content to live in settlements and should not visit them. It is nonsense to say that one cannot know the poor who does not live with them. You know the poor, if you take pains to know them; and you do not know the poor, if you do not take pains to know them. But what I would like to say is that, living eight years as I have, and seeing them early in the morning and all day long [end page 344] and late at night, and not being able to get away simply because one is caught with his sympathies, with his imagination, with his desires, with his interests, he does get a point of view which, I think, comes only to us on any subject when we give it continuous attention. And, after the settlements have given this attention, they would in deed be very stupid to minimize the people who are engaged in charitable and correctional work. We need them at every possible point. In Chicago, for instance, we have a day nursery at Hull House. We would a great deal rather have some one else establish the nursery, and use our money for something else; but we have it because there are not enough nurseries in that part of the city. We have a free kindergarten, because we cannot get

10 enough of them in the public schools of our ward. We have a coffee-house, from which we sell cheap foods in the winter at cost,-not because that sort of thing is what the settlement started out to do, but because we feel the pressure for it. One of the residents goes every day to the court, and has the children handed over to her probational care when they are first arrested,-not because we want to do that, but because we have no children' s court and no probation officer. We have no feeling with regard to the charities but one of hearty good fellowship. But we do ask your help; and we ask, when we come to you with a point of view gained from long and continuous observations that together we may study how to remedy some of the conditions which are so tenacious, and operate so constantly against the very poorest people. Let the settlement represent the sentiments of working people who have received no charity. It is so easy to stand just on the line, and then to get across the line, and to have the public opinion of your neighbors and of the charitable societies think of you as a pauper. I have not that great fear of pauperizing people which many of you seem to have. It is the feeling with which you give a piece of bread or the feeling with which you take it which determines whether the transaction shall be a pauperizing one. We have all accepted our bread from somebody, at least until we were fourteen; and we have help all the time from all sorts of people. If we can only make the medium of giving friendly enough, if we can only make a real fellowship, it does not have any difference whether you give an old Latin grammar or a pair of shoes. I should feel very much ashamed if my neighbor next door did not come to me when she [end page 345] wants money for her taxes, and borrow it from me as she would from any other friend. I should feel that I had been a failure as a friendly neighbor. Money is not so different from the rest of life, and shoes and soup need not be so different from books and pictures. You

11 can transfigure and transform them in the feeling of friendliness and kindliness. But you cannot do it wholesale. You cannot do it unless you really know people, and unless your feeling is genuine. This may be the only right view the settlement has at such a conference,-that its feeling for the poor is genuine, and that it gets a glimpse of charity from their point of view. [end page 346]