As soon as the weather turned cold, Chicago’s police stations and City Hall filled up every night with men who had no jobs and nowhere to go. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition–which announced Chicago’s arrival as a world-class city–had closed October 30, stranding workers by the hundreds and adding local desperation to the deepest nationwide depression the United States had ever seen. On the city’s teeming west side, newly arrived Italians, Greeks, Bohemians, and Polish and Russian Jews added their own bewilderment and poverty to the local and national distress.
“He did not come again for relief, but worked for two days digging on the canal, where he contracted pneumonia and died a week later. I have never lost trace of the two little children he left behind him, although I cannot see them without a bitter consciousness that it was at their expense I learned that life cannot be administered by definite rules and regulations; that wisdom to deal with a man’s difficulties comes only through some knowledge of his life and habits as a whole.”
I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study, might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself . . . [and that] the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago. –Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
She and Starr soon met with Dr. Frank Gunsaulus, a leading liberal clergyman, who (according to Ellen Starr’s report) asked unctuously if their idea was “to have a little training school where young ladies could be instructed how to deal with the poor.” Certainly not, they replied. “When we quite repudiated it & said we would have naught of a training school or any ‘institution’ whatever: that we were tired of institutions: that Miss Addams & Miss Starr simply intended to live there & get acquainted with the people & ask their friends of both classes to visit them he was ‘tickled to death.’ He said ‘good! The kingdom of heaven isn’t an organization or an institution.’”
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Addams accompanied relief workers and “attendance agents” (truant officers) on their rounds in the immigrant neighborhoods, and began her education in how the other half lived in Chicago. “It was exactly as if we were in a quarter of Naples or Rome,” she wrote to her sister, in a letter now stored in the University of Illinois’ Jane Addams memorial collection. “The parents and the children spoke nothing but Italian and dressed like Italian peasants. They were more crowded than I imagined people ever lived in America, four families for instance of six or eight each, living in one room for which they paid 11 dollars a month, and were constantly afraid of being ejected. Yet they were affectionate and gentle. . . . They never begged nor . . . complained, and in all aspects were immensely more attractive to me than the Irish neighborhood I went into last week . . .”
She sought out the politically marginal, visiting an anarchist Sunday school through the good offices of a hardware-store proprietor named Stauber. “He was pleased that I wanted to see the Sunday School. Said that ‘Americans never came up here, except the reporters of the capitalist newspapers and they always exaggerated.’ I went on Sunday afternoon, and found about 200 children assembled in a hall back of a saloon with some young men trying to teach them ‘free thought–without any religion or politics.’ The entire affair was very innocent. I was treated with great politeness and may take a class.”
