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THE FOUNDER OF HULL HOUSE IN CHICAGO
- JANE ADDAMS
The Subjective Necessity for Social
Settlements
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Jane Addams.
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Jane Addams' Social Settlements speech.
It follows the full text transcript of
Jane Addams' The Subjective Necessity for Social
Settlements speech, delivered at Plymouth, Massachusetts
-1892.
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The Ethical
Culture Societies held a summer school at
Plymouth, |
Massachusetts, in
1892, to which they invited several people
representing the then new Settlement movement,
that they might discuss with others the general
theme of Philanthropy and Social Progress.
I venture to
produce here parts of a lecture I delivered in
Plymouth, both because I have found it
impossible to formulate with the same freshness
those early motives and strivings, and because,
when published with other papers given that
summer, it was received by the Settlement people
themselves as a satisfactory statement.
I remember one golden summer afternoon during
the sessions of the summer school that several
of us met on the shores of a pond in a pine wood
a few miles from Plymouth, to discuss our new
movement. The natural leader of the group was
Robert A. Woods. He had recently returned from a
residence in Toynbee Hall, London, to open
Andover House in Boston, and had just issued a
book, English Social Movements, in which he had
gathered together and focused the many forms of
social endeavor preceding and contemporaneous
with the English Settlements. There were Miss
Vida D. Scudder and Miss Helena Dudley from the
College Settlement Association, Miss Julia C.
Lathrop and myself from Hull House. Some of us
had numbered our years as far as thirty, and we
all carefully avoided the extravagance of
statement which characterizes youth, and yet I
doubt if anywhere on the continent that summer
could have been found a group of people more
genuinely interested in social development or
more sincerely convinced that they had found a
clue by which the conditions in crowded cities
might be understood and the agencies for social
betterment developed.
We were all careful to avoid saying that we had
found a "life work," perhaps with an instinctive
dread of expending all our energy in vows of
constancy, as so often happens; and yet it is
interesting to note that all of the people whom
I have recalled as the enthusiasts at that
little conference have remained attached to
Settlements in actual residence for longer or
shorter periods each year during the eighteen
years which have elapsed since then, although
they have also been closely identified as
publicists or governmental officials with
movements outside. It is as if they had
discovered that the Settlement was too valuable
as a method as a way of approach to the social
question to be abandoned, although they had long
since discovered that it was not a "social
movement" in itself. This, however, is
anticipating the future, whereas the following
paper on "The Subjective Necessity for Social
Settlements" should have a chance to speak for
itself. It is perhaps too late in the day to
express regret for its stilted title.
This paper is an
attempt to analyze the motives which a movement
based, not only upon conviction, but upon
genuine emotion, wherever educated young people
are seeking an outlet for that sentiment of
universal brotherhood, which the best spirit of
our times is forcing from an emotion into a
motive.
These young people accomplish little
toward the solution of this social problem and
bear the brunt of being cultivated into
unnourished, oversensitive lives. They have been
shut off from 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.
These young men and women, longing to socialize
their democracy, are animated by certain hopes
which may be thus loosely formulated; that if in
democratic country nothing can be permanently
achieved save through the masses of the people,
it will be impossible to establish a higher
political life than the people themselves crave;
that it is difficult to see how the notion of a
higher civic life can be fostered save through
common intercourse; that the blessings which we
associate with a life of refinement and
cultivation can be made universal and must be
made universal if they are to be permanent; that
the good we secure for ourselves is precarious
and uncertain, is floating in midair, until it
is secured for all of us and incorporated into
our common life. It is easier to state these
hopes than to formulate the line of motives,
which I believe to constitute the trend of the
subjective pressure toward the Settlement. There
is something primordial about these motives, but
I am perhaps overbold in designating them as a
great desire to share the race life. 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; it is to live out but
half the humanity to which we have been born
heir and to use but half our faculties. We have
all had longings for a fuller life which should
include the use of these faculties. These
longings are the physical complement of the
"Intimations of Immortality," on which no ode
has yet been written. To portray these would be
the work of a poet, and it is hazardous for any
but a poet to attempt it.
You may remember the forlorn feeling which
occasionally seizes you when you arrive early in
the morning a stranger in a great city: the
stream of laboring people goes past you as you
gaze through the plate glass window of your
hotel; you see hard workingmen lifting great
burdens; you hear the driving and jostling of
huge carts and your heart sinks with a sudden
sense of futility. The door opens behind you and
you turn to the man who brings you in your
breakfast with a quick sense of human
fellowship. You find yourself praying that you
may never lose your hold on it all. A more
poetic prayer would be that the great mother
breasts of our common humanity, with its labor
and suffering and its homely comforts, may never
be withheld from you. You turn helplessly to the
waiter and feel that it would be almost
grotesque to claim from him the sympathy you
crave because civilization has placed you apart,
but you resent your position with a sudden sense
of snobbery. Literature is full of portrayals of
these glimpses: they come to shipwrecked men on
rafts; they overcome the differences of an
incongruous multitude when in the presence of a
great danger or when moved by a common
enthusiasm. They are not, however, confined to
such moments, and if we were in the habit of
telling them to each other, the recital would be
as long as the tales of children are, when they
sit down on the green grass and confide to each
other how many times they have remembered that
they lived once before. If these childish tales
are the stirring of inherited impressions, just
so surely is the other the striving of inherited
powers.
"It is true that there is nothing after disease,
indigence and a sense of guilt, so fatal to
health and to life itself as the want of a
proper outlet for active faculties." I have seen
young girls suffer and grow sensibly lowered in
vitality in the first years after they leave
school. In our attempt then to give a girl
pleasure and freedom from care we succeed, for
the most part, in making her pitifully
miserable. She finds "life" so different from
what she expected it to be. She is besotted with
innocent little ambitions, and does not
understand this apparent waste of herself, this
elaborate preparation, if no work is provided
for her. There is a heritage of noble obligation
which young people accept and long to
perpetuate. The desire for action, the wish to
right wrong and alleviate suffering haunts them
daily. 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 at
it begins with 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.
We do this in spite of the protest of the best
educators, Locke and Pestalozzi. We are
fortunate in the meantime if their unused
members do not weaken and disappear. They do
sometimes. There are a few girls who, by the
time they are "educated," forget their old
childish desires to help the world and to play
with poor little girls "who haven't playthings."
Parents are often inconsistent: they
deliberately expose their daughters to knowledge
of the distress in the world; they send them to
hear missionary addresses on famines in India
and China; they accompany them to lectures on
the suffering in Siberia; they agitate together
over the forgotten region of East London. In
addition to this, from babyhood the altruistic
tendencies of these daughters are persistently
cultivated. They are taught to be
self-forgetting and self-sacrificing, to
consider the good of the whole before the good
of the ego. But when all this information and
culture show results, when the daughter comes
back from college and begins to recognize her
social claim to the "submerged tenth," and to
evince a disposition to fulfill it, the family
claim is strenuously asserted; she is told that
she is unjustified, ill-advised in her efforts.
If she persists, the family too often are
injured and unhappy unless the efforts are
called missionary and the religious zeal of the
family carry them over their sense of abuse.
When this zeal does not exist, the result is
perplexing. It is a curious violation of what we
would fain believe a fundamental law that the
final return of the deed is upon the head of the
doer. The deed is that of exclusiveness and
caution, but the return, instead of falling upon
the head of the exclusive and cautious, falls
upon a young head full of generous and unselfish
plans. The girl loses something vital out of her
life to which she is entitled. She is restricted
and unhappy; her elders, meanwhile, are
unconscious of the situation and we have all the
elements of a tragedy.
We have in America a fast-growing number of
cultivated young people who have no recognized
outlet for their active faculties. They hear
constantly of the great social maladjustment,
but no way is provided for them to change it,
and their uselessness hangs about them heavily.
Huxley declares that the sense of usefulness is
the severest shock which the human system can
sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it
results in atrophy of function. These young
people have had advantages of college, of
European travel, and of economic study, but they
are sustaining this shock of inaction. They have
pet phrases, and they tell you that the things
that make us all alike are stronger than the
things that make us different. They say that all
men are united by needs and sympathies far more
permanent and radical than anything that
temporarily divides them and sets them in
opposition to each other. If they affect art,
they say that the decay in artistic expression
is due to the decay in ethics, that art when
shut away from the human interests and from the
great mass of humanity is self-destructive. They
tell their elders with all the bitterness of
youth that if they expect success from them in
business or politics or in whatever lines their
ambition for them has run, they must let them
consult all of humanity; that they must let them
find out what the people want and how they want
it. It is only the stronger young people,
however, who formulate this. Many of them
dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment.
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 which lowered vitality
and discontent. Walter Besant says they have had
the vision that Peter had when he saw he great
sheet let down from heaven, wherein was neither
clean nor unclean. He calls it the sense of
humanity. It is not philanthropy nor
benevolence, but a thing fuller and wider than
either of these.
This young life, so sincere in its emotion and
good phrase and yet so undirected, seems to me
as pitiful as the other great mass of destitute
lives. One is supplementary to the other, and
some method of communication can surely be
devised. Mr. Barnett, who urged the first
Settlement--Toynbee Hall, in East
London---recognize this need of outlet for the
young men of Oxford and Cambridge, and hoped
that the Settlement would supply the
communication. It is easy to see why the
Settlement movement originated in England, where
the years of education are more constrained and
definite than they are here, where class
distinctions are more rigid. The necessity of it
was greater there, but we are fast feeling the
pressure of the need and meeting the necessity
for Settlements in America. Our young people
feel nervously the need of putting theory into
action, and respond quickly to the Settlement
form or activity.
Other motives which I believe make toward the
Settlement are the result of a certain
renaissance going forward in Christianity. The
impulse to share the lives of the poor, the
desire to make social service, irrespective of
propaganda, express the spirit of Christ, is as
old as Christianity itself. We have no proof
from the records themselves that the early Roman
Christians, who strained their simple art to the
point of grotesqueness in their eagerness to
record a "good news" on the walls of the
catacombs, considered this good news a religion.
Jesus had no set of truths labeled Religious. On
the contrary, his doctrine was that all truth is
one, that the appropriation of it is freedom.
His teaching had no dogma to mark it off from
truth and action in general. He himself called
it a revelation--a life. These early Roman
Christians received the Gospel message, a
command to love all men, with a certain joyous
simplicity. The image of the Good Shepherd is
blithe and gay beyond the gentlest shepherd of
Greek mythology; the hart no longer pants, but
rushes to the water brooks. The Christians
looked for the continuous revelation, but
believed what Jesus said, that this revelation,
to be retained and made manifest, must be put
into terms of action; that action is the only
medium man has for receiving and appropriating
truth; that the doctrine must be known through
the will.
That Christianity has to be revealed and
embodied in the line of social progress is a
corollary to the simple proposition that man's
action is found in his social relationships in
the way in which he connects with his fellows;
that his motives for action are the zeal and
affection with which he regards his fellows. By
this simple process was created-deep enthusiasm
for 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 pre-eminently 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 never occurred to them, either
in their weakness or in the 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
no avoid the plague; they longed to share the
common lot that they might receive the constant
revelation. It was a new treasure which the
early Christians added to the sum of all
treasures, a joy hitherto unknown in the
world--the joy of finding the Christ which lieth
in each man, but which no man can unfold save in
fellowship. A happiness ranging from the heroic
to the pastoral enveloped them. They were to
possess a revelation as long as life had new
meaning to unfold, new action to propose.
I believe that there is a distinct turning among
many young men and women toward this simple
acceptance of Christ's message. They resent the
assumption that Christianity is a set of ideas
which belong to the religious consciousness,
whatever that may be. They insist that it cannot
be proclaimed and instituted apart from the
social life of the community and that it must
seek a simple and natural expression in the
social or organism itself. The Settlement
movement is only one manifestation of that wider
humanitarian movement which throughout
Christendom, put pre-eminently in England, is
endeavoring to embody itself, not in a sect, but
in society itself.
I believe that this turning, this renaissance of
the early Christian humanitarianism, is going on
in America, in Chicago, if you please, without
leaders who write or philosophize, without much
speaking, but with a bent to expression social
service and in terms of action the spirit of
Christ. Certain it is that spiritual force is
found in the Settlement movement, and it is also
true that this force must be evoked and must be
called into play before the success of any
Settlement is assured. There must be the
overmastering belief that all that is noblest in
life is common to men as men, in order to
accentuate the likenesses and ignore the
differences which are found among the people
whom the Settlement constantly brings into
juxtaposition. It may be true, as the
Positivists insist, that the very religious
fervor of man can be turned into love for his
race, and his desire for a future life into
content to live in the echo of his deeds; Paul's
formula of seeking for the Christ which lieth in
each man and founding our likenesses on him,
seems a simpler formula to many of us.
In a thousand voices singing the Hallelujah
Chorus in Handel's "Messiah," it is possible to
distinguish the leading voices, but the
differences of training and cultivation between
them and the voices of the chorus, are lost in
the unity of purpose and in the fact that they
are all human voices lifted by a high motive.
This is a weak illustration of what a Settlement
attempts to do. It aims, in a measure, to
develop whatever of social life its neighborhood
may afford, to focus and give form to that life,
to bring to bear upon it the results of
cultivation and training; but it receives in
exchange for the music of isolated voices the
volume and strength of the chorus. It is quite
impossible for me to say in what proportion or
degree the subjective necessity which led to the
opening of Hull-House combined the three trends:
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; possibly a love of approbation,
so vast that it is not content with the treble
clapping of delicate hands, but wishes also to
hear the brass notes from toughened palms, may
mingle with these.
The Settlement, then, is an experimental effort
to aid in the solution of the social and
industrial problems which are engendered by the
modem conditions of life in a great city. It
insists that these problems are not confined to
any one portion of a city. It is an attempt to
relieve, at the same time, the over accumulation
at one end of society and the destitution at the
other; but it assumes that this over
accumulation 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 one 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. It must be open to
conviction and must have a deep and abiding
sense of tolerance. 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. They must be content to live
quietly side by side with their neighbors, until
they grow into a sense of relationship and
mutual interests. Their neighbors are held apart
by differences of race and language which the
residents can more easily overcome. They are
bound to see the needs of their neighborhood as
a whole, to furnish data for legislation, and to
use their influence to secure it. In short,
residents are pledged to devote themselves to
the duties of good citizenship and to the
arousing of the social energies which too
largely lie dormant in every neighborhood given
over to industrialism. They are bound to regard
the entire life of their city as organic, to
make an effort to unify it, and to protest
against its over-differentiation.
It is always easy to make all philosophy point
one particular moral and all history adorn one
particular tale; but I may be forgiven the
reminder that the best speculative philosophy
sets forth the solidarity of the human race;
that the highest moralists have taught that
without the advance and improvement of the
whole, no man can hope for any lasting
improvement in his own moral or material
individual condition; and that the subjective
necessity for Social Settlements is therefore
identical with that necessity which urges us on
toward social and individual salvation.
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