August 26, 2013 • 26 mins
Jane Addams was one of the foremost women in America's Progressive Era. She co founded the social settlement Hull House, spoke and wrote on social issues, and had a hand in the founding of many social organizations, including the NAACP and ACLU.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trec Vie Wilson. Come, I'm Holly Frying. Today we're
going to talk about one of those people who have
been requested so many times. Yes, we cannot say all
(00:23):
the people who have requested would almost be its own podcast. Yes,
and that person is Jane Adams. And she's one of
those people who accomplished so much during her lifetime and
was so beloved for most of it that it's really
hard to sum her up in just a couple of sentences,
like we often try to do at the beginning of
our podcast. She was one of the foremost women in
(00:46):
America's progressive era, which is when thinkers and activists were
really working to address all these problems that had been
brought on by urbanization and industrialization. So progressives were working
to combat violence, poverty, greed, class warfare, racism, and a
lot of other social issues, and Jane Adams made meaningful
(01:08):
contributions to all of these. Yeah, her accomplishments were really prolific.
One of the big ones is that she co founded
Hull House, which was America's most well known and influential
social settlement. She also wrote eleven books and numerous articles,
and she was a frequent speaker on issues relating to women, children, immigrants,
and the poor. She founded or helped found social organizations
(01:32):
that still exist today, including the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People otherwise known as the INN double
a CP, and the American Civil Liberties Unions. So when
you hear people talk about the a c l U,
Jane Adams had a big hand in its founding, and
she was also an officer or board member on many
many other organizations. Uh. And she was the first American
(01:52):
woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. So yes, Tracy said,
not one that's easy to sum up in a sentence
or two. So her popularity was not completely universal, though
by World War One she was just as likely to
be called, in the words of FBI director Jaeder Hoover,
the most dangerous woman in America. We'll talk more about
(02:13):
that in the second part of this two parter, but
today we will look at Hull House and the social
settlement movement in America. So we'll start at the beginning,
which is where she was born. She was originally born
Laura Jane Adams in Cedarville, Illinois, and that was on
September six of eighteen sixty uh. Cedarville was a very
small farming community in the northwestern part of Illinois, not
(02:37):
far south from the Wisconsin state line. Her parents were
John Hueie Adams and Sarah Weber. Her father was a
well off industrialist. He owned a grain mill and had
interest in a bank as well as a number of
other investments, and he was a state senator for sixteen years.
Sarah died when Jane was two, and John remarried, this
(02:59):
time to widow named Anna Holdeman in eighteen sixty eight.
So they were really an educated, affluent family. And Jane
was born with this final defect, which was corrected resurgery
when she was quite young. But her health throughout her
life was often poor. She didn't really uh enjoy robust
good health. She started college at Rockford Female Seminary in
(03:24):
eighteen seventy seven. She served as class president for all
her four of her years there, and she edited the
school magazine and served as president of the literary Society.
She graduated in eighteen eighty one. Uh. And you know,
just for reference, it was pretty uncommon for the time period,
even among affluent women to have achieved that. She was
(03:45):
also the valed Ectorian, and in eighteen eighty two, when
the school's program became accredited and it became known as
Rockford College for Women, she became the first person to
receive its back laureate degree, and today Rockford College for
Women is Rockford University. And Jane had been raised in
a Christian household, and her family had instilled in her
(04:05):
a deep sense of Christian values along with the sense
of importance of community involvement in the arts, and after graduation,
she wanted to find a secular way to put all
of those ideals into practice, rather than becoming a teacher
or a missionary, and at a time, those were really
the only two socially acceptable options for an educated woman
(04:26):
in terms of life work at this point in American history.
Her only other option really would have been to return
home and care for family. So, as you might imagine,
for someone who had gone to college and done so
very well to have such limited options, this was a
really frustrating time in her life, and she spent the
(04:46):
next few years trying to figure out what her path
would be. So she dabbled a little bit in travel
and medical study. She actually had to abandon her medical
study because of her health. She also read extens of
Lee and sadly was in and out of the hospital
during this time. This is a period of years of
soul searching and trying to figure out what she could
(05:08):
do that would be acceptable for her to do, that
would also fulfill her Yeah, and finally, while traveling in London,
it came to her all of these ideas and these
thoughts and desire she had coalesced into a decision to
start a social settlement. So let's talk about social settlements
for a minute. Yes, indeed, they got their start in
(05:30):
England in the eighteen eighties. The first was Toynbee Hall,
which was in East London and that actually still exists today.
And the idea behind them is that educated, middle class
people who were quite affluent compared to the people in
the neighborhood surrounding these settlements would move to a more urban,
lower income area and in doing so they would also
(05:51):
provide help and service to the people living there. The
residents of the settlement would stay there anywhere from say
a year to their entire lives, and they were generally
motivated by a desire to contribute to the community and
to try to bridge the gap between the different classes.
Some of the residents had jobs somewhere else in the city,
(06:12):
and most of them volunteered their time towards the services
that the settlement was providing to the neighborhood. So the
settlement would provide all kinds of support and aid to
the surrounding community, like classes and childcare and employment help
and libraries. They also often provided a place for logo
groups and clubs to meet, So it was a very
(06:33):
community building endeavor, and it's important to note that it
wasn't so much about charity. Even though some settlement houses
did provide things like meals and clothing and shelter, the
focus was really more um, intellectual and social usually, so
the houses tried to address the social and cultural and
intellectual needs of the community. So while other organizations were
(06:56):
more about people's physical poverty, Hull House and most so
their social settlements were really about addressing spiritual and intellectual poverty.
So it was really improvement of a different kind. So
the overall approach within the settlement movement was not hey,
lets us rich, smart white people go move somewhere and
fix all the poor immigrants. Like there were definitely people
(07:19):
who joined the movement, individual people who had this attitude,
but really the focus was all about cooperation and community.
It was about offering support and services while also learning
from the people in the neighborhood. So it was meant
to be beneficial for everyone who was involved in it,
and not sort of this giant effort of of rich
(07:40):
people to go and fix up the poor people. Writing
for nonprofit Quarterly, Rick Hohen explains that Hull House quote
aimed to change the conditions of poor immigrant communities and
the mindsets of both the poor and the privileged. So
while some social sudd months were religiously affiliated, Hull House
(08:02):
was secular, and there were actually more than one hundred
such houses in the United States by nineteen hundred, and
more than four hundred by the time World War One started.
They declined a little bit after the First World War
and the Great Depression, and while there are still active
settlement houses today, community centers and other philanthropic organizations are
(08:23):
really much more common. Along with Ellen Gates, Star Jane
founded Hull House in Chicago's Near West Side in eighteen
ninety nine, this was a really poor and rough neighborhood.
Hull House was the second settlement house in the United States,
and it became one of the most influential, if not
the most influential, in the world. Ellen Star actually lived
(08:46):
there for nearly thirty years, and she was particularly active
in the Hull House's art programs. Jane lived there as well,
although travel and her health took her to many other
places as well, particularly in her later years. Later on,
she also stayed with Mary Roseate Smith, who was a
Hull House donor and volunteer. Most biographies described Mary and
(09:08):
Jane as companions or romantic friends, or describe their relationship
as a Boston marriage, which was sort of a word
for two women that owned a home together without men
there and Ellen and Jane had visited Toynbee Hall while
they were on a trip to London, and they decided
to follow a similar model for their settlement in Chicago.
(09:28):
Her goal was, in Jane's words quote, to provide a
center for a higher civic and social life, to institute
and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and
improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago. They
started by renting an abandoned mansion that had been built
by Charles G. Hull in eighteen fifty six, although when
(09:50):
their landlord, Helen Culver, learned what they were up to there,
she stopped collecting the rent and eventually just gave the
building to them. That in Dever was largely self funded
through Jane's own inheritance her father had passed away in
eighty one and left her some money, and then later
it was funded through donations and then much later through
(10:11):
government funding, and it was staffed by volunteers, usually the
people living in a settlement house, where natives of the
country where the settlement house was located, and then often
the surrounding community had a really heavily immigrant population. When
it was founded, Hull Houses neighborhood was densely populated and
(10:31):
really low income, and it was largely made up of
impoverished immigrants from various European nations, including Italy and Greece.
Later on in the twenties, African Americans and Mexicans also
started to move into the neighborhood. One of Hull House's
first programs was actually a kindergarten uh and that was
followed by a daycare for infants and young children, and
(10:53):
then clubs for older children, and then classes and lectures
for adults. So they almost sort of started early and
then through it into older or not older age, but
aged up program. Yeah, it's scope kept getting broader and
broader as they went along. Yeah, and the classes eventually
included college level courses, and there was a really big
focus on civics and civic duty. Within two years, Hull
(11:17):
House was seeing two thousand people a week. That's a lot.
It's a lot of coming through a community house, well,
especially considering that there were never more than say, twenty
people living there as residents. To do all this work
at a given time, that's a lot of work. But
Hull House continued to grow. Eventually it comprised thirteen different
(11:38):
buildings and it took up half a city block, and
its first additional building was actually an art gallery, and
it also came to house, among other things, a library
and art studio, a music school, and an employment bureau.
Hull House also created the first public playground, gymnasium, and
swimming pool in Chicago. Hull House started out as really
(12:00):
a social and intellectual resource for the impoverished immigrant and
African American population of Chicago. But it grew into an
advocacy in lobbying organization fighting for labor reform, social reform,
and a variety of other progressive causes, including legal protections
for women, children, and the poor and other really disadvantaged
(12:22):
persons and groups. So rattling off all of the specific
legislation that hull House was part of would make this
into a long list podcast. It would just be like
bills and dates. But to sum it up, hull House
was really about protecting people and improving quality of life,
and that could reach into sanitation, working conditions, health care,
(12:43):
or even legal protections for at risk populations. For example,
a hull House actually helped to create the first juvenile
court in the US, and their efforts contributed to legal
protections for women and children in Illinois in as well
as the establishment of a federal Children's Bureau in nine
and then also the passage of a federal child labor
(13:05):
law in nineteen six. Those are all pretty huge accomplishments,
especially given how little there was just not a let
a lot of legislation in place at that time. Like
a lot of the really scary working conditions stories that
you hear about in history come from before that era,
when there was really not any kind of accountability in
(13:28):
place at all for the way businesses approached the health
and safety of their workers. So Hull House attracted a
lot of really notable residents and volunteers, and a lot
of them moved on into other progressive era advocacy work
of their own. It became kind of an incubator for
other progressive reformers, especially women. And so we're going to
(13:50):
kind of tick through some of the really notable examples
and a couple of notes of their accomplishments. Florence Kelly
moved to New York's Henry Street Settlement and helped found
the Children's Bureau of the Federal Department of Labor. Julia
Lathrop was the first head of the Children's Bureau and
the first woman to head a federal agency. She helped
(14:11):
get federal funding for healthcare programs for infants and mothers
under the Shepherd Town or Maternity and Infancy Act. Alice
Hamilton's worked extensively on the issue of lead poisoning, which
led to improved safety standards. She also became an investigator
for the U. S Bureau of labor and was the
first woman to be on the faculty at Harvard. Sophie
(14:32):
and Isabel Breckinridge, who was the first woman to get
a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago
and the first woman to graduate from its law school,
helped found the Chicago Women's Trade Union League and the
Chicago chapter of the n double a CP. She also
wrote really prolifically about social work. Grace and Edith Abbott
(14:53):
were sisters that were involved, and Grace was the first
director of the Immigrants Protective League and actually held that
position or nine years. Edith served as president of the
National Conference of Social Work and the American Association of
Schools of Social Work. So as a family they really
achieved a great deal right well, and the whole of
(15:14):
Hull House. It continued to operate in this way for
several more years, and and it sort of can be
summed up as simultaneously providing actual assistance and resources to
this community of impoverished people and trying to work for
the greater good of other threatened populations through the rest
of the United States. Um and that continued to be
(15:37):
the case for many many years. Hull House actually existed
until its mission and its structure changed pretty significantly between
the twenties, which was the peak of the settlement movement
UH and the year before when we're recording this, when
it closed and Jane Adams actually died of cancer in
(15:57):
She had been ill for quite some time, so she
had a dually given up various aspects of her work
in leading Hull House and handed them over to other
people because she had been so devoted to the House
and to other progressive causes that it came to exemplify
she left really enormous shoes to fill. And during her
life Jane had been head Resident and she was in
(16:18):
control over the board, and after her death these duties
fell to two different people. Adina miller Rich became head
Resident and Louise to Covid Bowen became head of the
Board of Trustees. These two disagreed frequently and very passionately,
until Adina finally resigned. The Head Residents who came after
her seemed less dedicated to Jane's ideas of social progress
(16:42):
and more about seeing to the needs of the immediate community,
and it gradually became less of an advocacy organization and
more of a practical The focus shifted a little closer
to home in all of its operations. Hull House gradually
became more like a typical nonp fit that you would
see today. It moved from an almost entirely volunteer staff
(17:05):
to one that was largely paid and supplemented with volunteers.
In nineteen sixty one, the Hull House buildings were to
be demolished for University of Illinois campus, resulting in protests.
Two years later, the trustees of Hull House made plans
to decentralize its services. The original Hull mansion and dining
(17:25):
hall actually became museums, but the rest of the buildings
were finally demolished to make way for the university. At
this point, Hull House became the Hull House Association, with
its programs and its resources spread out to different community
and neighborhood centers around Chicago. This decentralization was really also
a massive shift in how Hull House worked and how
(17:48):
it needed to manage its money, which was operationally hard
to manage, and it didn't do it entirely successfully. By
nineteen sixty nine, it had an operational deficit of two
million dollar dollars. The various sites actually wound up competing
with one another for support, and by nineteen eighty five
it was operating from twenty nine different sites around Chicago,
(18:11):
many of which were drawing from the same basic pool
of donation resources, so it was tight. It was kind
of a zero sum game. Yeah, they weren't helping themselves.
In ninete, in an attempt to close this gap and
make sure it would just be able to continue to operate,
Hull House scaled its focus way back, started working primarily
(18:34):
on foster care, and it dropped a lot of the
programs that were related to employment and culture and the
other services that had been part of its original mission.
And then in two thousand nine, it really started aggressively
cutting costs, including the employee pension plan UH. It also
loosened restrictions on its endowment so that the organization could
(18:55):
use some of that money towards other purposes. But on
January nine, the leadership of Hull House announced that it
was closing and declaring bankruptcy following a decline in government funding.
In spite of efforts to bring in more private donors,
it was by that point getting as much as eighty
five of its funds from the governments This is a
(19:17):
complete shift from when it was founded and was entirely
funded by Jane adams uh inheritance and the work of donors.
Hull House tried to raise enough money from donors to
stay open, but it just wasn't able to do it.
A week after the announcement, Hull House ceased operations and
(19:37):
laid off its entire staff of three hundred people, and
that put an end to a hundred and twenty three
years of operation. And of course, there was a lot
of speculation about what Jane would have thought about Hull
House closing, and opinions on that front are kind of divided,
but there's a general consensus that given her history of
advocating for labor rights, she would have been organizing the
(20:01):
pro the employees who lost their job, who really were
given almost no notice and didn't get any kind of
severance and protest. There's now a Jane Adams Hull House Museum,
which is built on the original Hull House site in
the whole home and the residents dining Hall. They have
a really impressive website that includes all kinds of stuff
(20:21):
about the museum and about her and about the Hull
House and all of that. Very cool. There are also
still settlement houses today, although many of them are non residential.
They sort of have the name, but but not the
function the same way and not the part where a
person was actually relocating to a community that was in need.
At least in the United States, community and neighborhood centers
(20:42):
have become a lot more common way of getting those
same sorts of resources into a community. So that is uh,
Jane Adams Hull House years, that element of her life.
In the next episode, we will talk about all of
that other stuff that Jane Adams did, because there was
really a lot of it. This is one of those
situations where we feel like we could have recorded eight
(21:05):
different episodes. Yeah, a really long series on Jane Adams.
If ever there were a historical figure that will make
you feel lazy, it's a Jane Adam, So you will
move to that next. Yes, I also have some listener
my own, please share. So this is from Bill, and
Bill says hello, Tracy and Holly. He talks about how
(21:26):
he's been listening for more than a year, and he
talks about several of our episodes. So he says, first
of all, I just listened to the ice Cream Podcast
While you did talk about the rise of ice cream
is a popular American food, you seem a little uncertain
as to why it has become such an American phenomenon
in the last century or two. I was initially puzzled
by this as I was listening to the podcast while
(21:48):
driving through rural northern Japan, and I passed several ice
cream shops and farms advertising homemade ice cream along the way.
I know, I'm just thinking about that makes me glad
that lunch is not too far away, he goes on
to say. But as I thought about it, an explanation
came to me milk prices. I live in Hokkaido, which
(22:10):
is basically Japan's dairy land. Even so, milk costs about
two yen a leader just about seven dollars and fifty
cents a gallon here. My sister, who lives in a
similarly rural town in Ohio, says that it is about
two and a half times what they pay for milk
at the grocery store. Other dairy products like butter and
(22:30):
cheese are similarly expensive here, even though they're made locally
and shipped to the rest of Japan. America has a
huge dairy industry, leading to lower prices on all dairy products,
ice cream included. In the case of countries like Japan
and China, they don't have as extensive of a dairy tradition,
while most countries with longer ice cream traditions don't have
(22:51):
the space for cattle farming necessary to bring prices so low.
So basically, Bill is theorizing of the reason the reason
ice cream is such an American pastime for eating because
we have so much milk. That makes so much sense.
I hadn't thought about it from the economic versus sort
of just general cultural right, but right makes complete sense. Well,
(23:14):
And we also got a note from another listener who
talked about how we didn't really go into the idea
of the soda fountain as sort of a place to
hang out in community. Um, which I think we might
have touched on tangentially. But yeah, that also played a
role in the world of ice cream. Uh So, Bill
goes on to say, my year old comment is related
(23:35):
to the ten Historical Hoaxes episode recorded by your predecessors.
One of those hoaxes was the newer Coli Stones, which,
regardless of their status as a hoax, are an interesting
historical tale in and of themselves. When they finished that
story on the podcast, they mentioned that the stones were
currently located in the Johnson Hummer House Museum in Ohio.
(23:56):
I was so disappointed that they left out the city
that the museum is in, my hometown, Coshakton. It's a
very small city, barely qualifying for the title based on
its population just there were the ten thousand mark, and
it's actually quite rural, considering that the nearest larger city
is a forty five minute drive away, and the nearest
city you've probably heard of is ninety minutes away. All
(24:17):
that considered, I would have been overjoyed to hear my
humble little hometown mentioned in a podcast I listened to you.
I had planned to write in but kept putting it off. Well,
now it happens, I know. Fast forward a year or
so to your podcast about Johnny apple Seed and your
reply to one of the listener males you read. You
mentioned a book on the history of Coshakton County with
an impressively long title as one of your major sources
(24:38):
for the podcast. Finally, my little corner of nowhere got
its brief moment in the sun. Thank you so much
for that, and it's really a strange feeling to hear
my hometown mentioned by anybody who wasn't born there. Kind
of goes on to talk about some podcast suggestions which
we will save in case we want to surprise people
with them later, and then says, thanks for making my
(24:59):
daily commute interesting and educational. So thank you so much. Bill. Yeah,
lots of interesting insights and thoughts. I love it. Yeah,
it kind of reminds me of uh, I like, I
like how people find such comfort in hearing their place. Yeah,
it's a little connection mentioned somewhere. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast,
(25:21):
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stuff and on Twitter at misston History. Are tumbler is
at mist in history dot tumbler dot com, and we've
been putting away on Pinterest. If you want to learn
a little more about some of what we've talked about today,
you can go to our website and search for the
(25:41):
word philanthropy and you will find how philanthropy works. You
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trec Vie Wilson. Come, I'm Holly Frying. Today we're
going to talk about one of those people who have
been requested so many times. Yes, we cannot say all
(00:23):
the people who have requested would almost be its own podcast. Yes,
and that person is Jane Adams. And she's one of
those people who accomplished so much during her lifetime and
was so beloved for most of it that it's really
hard to sum her up in just a couple of sentences,
like we often try to do at the beginning of
our podcast. She was one of the foremost women in
(00:46):
America's progressive era, which is when thinkers and activists were
really working to address all these problems that had been
brought on by urbanization and industrialization. So progressives were working
to combat violence, poverty, greed, class warfare, racism, and a
lot of other social issues, and Jane Adams made meaningful
(01:08):
contributions to all of these. Yeah, her accomplishments were really prolific.
One of the big ones is that she co founded
Hull House, which was America's most well known and influential
social settlement. She also wrote eleven books and numerous articles,
and she was a frequent speaker on issues relating to women, children, immigrants,
and the poor. She founded or helped found social organizations
(01:32):
that still exist today, including the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People otherwise known as the INN double
a CP, and the American Civil Liberties Unions. So when
you hear people talk about the a c l U,
Jane Adams had a big hand in its founding, and
she was also an officer or board member on many
many other organizations. Uh. And she was the first American
(01:52):
woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. So yes, Tracy said,
not one that's easy to sum up in a sentence
or two. So her popularity was not completely universal, though
by World War One she was just as likely to
be called, in the words of FBI director Jaeder Hoover,
the most dangerous woman in America. We'll talk more about
(02:13):
that in the second part of this two parter, but
today we will look at Hull House and the social
settlement movement in America. So we'll start at the beginning,
which is where she was born. She was originally born
Laura Jane Adams in Cedarville, Illinois, and that was on
September six of eighteen sixty uh. Cedarville was a very
small farming community in the northwestern part of Illinois, not
(02:37):
far south from the Wisconsin state line. Her parents were
John Hueie Adams and Sarah Weber. Her father was a
well off industrialist. He owned a grain mill and had
interest in a bank as well as a number of
other investments, and he was a state senator for sixteen years.
Sarah died when Jane was two, and John remarried, this
(02:59):
time to widow named Anna Holdeman in eighteen sixty eight.
So they were really an educated, affluent family. And Jane
was born with this final defect, which was corrected resurgery
when she was quite young. But her health throughout her
life was often poor. She didn't really uh enjoy robust
good health. She started college at Rockford Female Seminary in
(03:24):
eighteen seventy seven. She served as class president for all
her four of her years there, and she edited the
school magazine and served as president of the literary Society.
She graduated in eighteen eighty one. Uh. And you know,
just for reference, it was pretty uncommon for the time period,
even among affluent women to have achieved that. She was
(03:45):
also the valed Ectorian, and in eighteen eighty two, when
the school's program became accredited and it became known as
Rockford College for Women, she became the first person to
receive its back laureate degree, and today Rockford College for
Women is Rockford University. And Jane had been raised in
a Christian household, and her family had instilled in her
(04:05):
a deep sense of Christian values along with the sense
of importance of community involvement in the arts, and after graduation,
she wanted to find a secular way to put all
of those ideals into practice, rather than becoming a teacher
or a missionary, and at a time, those were really
the only two socially acceptable options for an educated woman
(04:26):
in terms of life work at this point in American history.
Her only other option really would have been to return
home and care for family. So, as you might imagine,
for someone who had gone to college and done so
very well to have such limited options, this was a
really frustrating time in her life, and she spent the
(04:46):
next few years trying to figure out what her path
would be. So she dabbled a little bit in travel
and medical study. She actually had to abandon her medical
study because of her health. She also read extens of
Lee and sadly was in and out of the hospital
during this time. This is a period of years of
soul searching and trying to figure out what she could
(05:08):
do that would be acceptable for her to do, that
would also fulfill her Yeah, and finally, while traveling in London,
it came to her all of these ideas and these
thoughts and desire she had coalesced into a decision to
start a social settlement. So let's talk about social settlements
for a minute. Yes, indeed, they got their start in
(05:30):
England in the eighteen eighties. The first was Toynbee Hall,
which was in East London and that actually still exists today.
And the idea behind them is that educated, middle class
people who were quite affluent compared to the people in
the neighborhood surrounding these settlements would move to a more urban,
lower income area and in doing so they would also
(05:51):
provide help and service to the people living there. The
residents of the settlement would stay there anywhere from say
a year to their entire lives, and they were generally
motivated by a desire to contribute to the community and
to try to bridge the gap between the different classes.
Some of the residents had jobs somewhere else in the city,
(06:12):
and most of them volunteered their time towards the services
that the settlement was providing to the neighborhood. So the
settlement would provide all kinds of support and aid to
the surrounding community, like classes and childcare and employment help
and libraries. They also often provided a place for logo
groups and clubs to meet, So it was a very
(06:33):
community building endeavor, and it's important to note that it
wasn't so much about charity. Even though some settlement houses
did provide things like meals and clothing and shelter, the
focus was really more um, intellectual and social usually, so
the houses tried to address the social and cultural and
intellectual needs of the community. So while other organizations were
(06:56):
more about people's physical poverty, Hull House and most so
their social settlements were really about addressing spiritual and intellectual poverty.
So it was really improvement of a different kind. So
the overall approach within the settlement movement was not hey,
lets us rich, smart white people go move somewhere and
fix all the poor immigrants. Like there were definitely people
(07:19):
who joined the movement, individual people who had this attitude,
but really the focus was all about cooperation and community.
It was about offering support and services while also learning
from the people in the neighborhood. So it was meant
to be beneficial for everyone who was involved in it,
and not sort of this giant effort of of rich
(07:40):
people to go and fix up the poor people. Writing
for nonprofit Quarterly, Rick Hohen explains that Hull House quote
aimed to change the conditions of poor immigrant communities and
the mindsets of both the poor and the privileged. So
while some social sudd months were religiously affiliated, Hull House
(08:02):
was secular, and there were actually more than one hundred
such houses in the United States by nineteen hundred, and
more than four hundred by the time World War One started.
They declined a little bit after the First World War
and the Great Depression, and while there are still active
settlement houses today, community centers and other philanthropic organizations are
(08:23):
really much more common. Along with Ellen Gates, Star Jane
founded Hull House in Chicago's Near West Side in eighteen
ninety nine, this was a really poor and rough neighborhood.
Hull House was the second settlement house in the United States,
and it became one of the most influential, if not
the most influential, in the world. Ellen Star actually lived
(08:46):
there for nearly thirty years, and she was particularly active
in the Hull House's art programs. Jane lived there as well,
although travel and her health took her to many other
places as well, particularly in her later years. Later on,
she also stayed with Mary Roseate Smith, who was a
Hull House donor and volunteer. Most biographies described Mary and
(09:08):
Jane as companions or romantic friends, or describe their relationship
as a Boston marriage, which was sort of a word
for two women that owned a home together without men
there and Ellen and Jane had visited Toynbee Hall while
they were on a trip to London, and they decided
to follow a similar model for their settlement in Chicago.
(09:28):
Her goal was, in Jane's words quote, to provide a
center for a higher civic and social life, to institute
and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and
improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago. They
started by renting an abandoned mansion that had been built
by Charles G. Hull in eighteen fifty six, although when
(09:50):
their landlord, Helen Culver, learned what they were up to there,
she stopped collecting the rent and eventually just gave the
building to them. That in Dever was largely self funded
through Jane's own inheritance her father had passed away in
eighty one and left her some money, and then later
it was funded through donations and then much later through
(10:11):
government funding, and it was staffed by volunteers, usually the
people living in a settlement house, where natives of the
country where the settlement house was located, and then often
the surrounding community had a really heavily immigrant population. When
it was founded, Hull Houses neighborhood was densely populated and
(10:31):
really low income, and it was largely made up of
impoverished immigrants from various European nations, including Italy and Greece.
Later on in the twenties, African Americans and Mexicans also
started to move into the neighborhood. One of Hull House's
first programs was actually a kindergarten uh and that was
followed by a daycare for infants and young children, and
(10:53):
then clubs for older children, and then classes and lectures
for adults. So they almost sort of started early and
then through it into older or not older age, but
aged up program. Yeah, it's scope kept getting broader and
broader as they went along. Yeah, and the classes eventually
included college level courses, and there was a really big
focus on civics and civic duty. Within two years, Hull
(11:17):
House was seeing two thousand people a week. That's a lot.
It's a lot of coming through a community house, well,
especially considering that there were never more than say, twenty
people living there as residents. To do all this work
at a given time, that's a lot of work. But
Hull House continued to grow. Eventually it comprised thirteen different
(11:38):
buildings and it took up half a city block, and
its first additional building was actually an art gallery, and
it also came to house, among other things, a library
and art studio, a music school, and an employment bureau.
Hull House also created the first public playground, gymnasium, and
swimming pool in Chicago. Hull House started out as really
(12:00):
a social and intellectual resource for the impoverished immigrant and
African American population of Chicago. But it grew into an
advocacy in lobbying organization fighting for labor reform, social reform,
and a variety of other progressive causes, including legal protections
for women, children, and the poor and other really disadvantaged
(12:22):
persons and groups. So rattling off all of the specific
legislation that hull House was part of would make this
into a long list podcast. It would just be like
bills and dates. But to sum it up, hull House
was really about protecting people and improving quality of life,
and that could reach into sanitation, working conditions, health care,
(12:43):
or even legal protections for at risk populations. For example,
a hull House actually helped to create the first juvenile
court in the US, and their efforts contributed to legal
protections for women and children in Illinois in as well
as the establishment of a federal Children's Bureau in nine
and then also the passage of a federal child labor
(13:05):
law in nineteen six. Those are all pretty huge accomplishments,
especially given how little there was just not a let
a lot of legislation in place at that time. Like
a lot of the really scary working conditions stories that
you hear about in history come from before that era,
when there was really not any kind of accountability in
(13:28):
place at all for the way businesses approached the health
and safety of their workers. So Hull House attracted a
lot of really notable residents and volunteers, and a lot
of them moved on into other progressive era advocacy work
of their own. It became kind of an incubator for
other progressive reformers, especially women. And so we're going to
(13:50):
kind of tick through some of the really notable examples
and a couple of notes of their accomplishments. Florence Kelly
moved to New York's Henry Street Settlement and helped found
the Children's Bureau of the Federal Department of Labor. Julia
Lathrop was the first head of the Children's Bureau and
the first woman to head a federal agency. She helped
(14:11):
get federal funding for healthcare programs for infants and mothers
under the Shepherd Town or Maternity and Infancy Act. Alice
Hamilton's worked extensively on the issue of lead poisoning, which
led to improved safety standards. She also became an investigator
for the U. S Bureau of labor and was the
first woman to be on the faculty at Harvard. Sophie
(14:32):
and Isabel Breckinridge, who was the first woman to get
a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago
and the first woman to graduate from its law school,
helped found the Chicago Women's Trade Union League and the
Chicago chapter of the n double a CP. She also
wrote really prolifically about social work. Grace and Edith Abbott
(14:53):
were sisters that were involved, and Grace was the first
director of the Immigrants Protective League and actually held that
position or nine years. Edith served as president of the
National Conference of Social Work and the American Association of
Schools of Social Work. So as a family they really
achieved a great deal right well, and the whole of
(15:14):
Hull House. It continued to operate in this way for
several more years, and and it sort of can be
summed up as simultaneously providing actual assistance and resources to
this community of impoverished people and trying to work for
the greater good of other threatened populations through the rest
of the United States. Um and that continued to be
(15:37):
the case for many many years. Hull House actually existed
until its mission and its structure changed pretty significantly between
the twenties, which was the peak of the settlement movement
UH and the year before when we're recording this, when
it closed and Jane Adams actually died of cancer in
(15:57):
She had been ill for quite some time, so she
had a dually given up various aspects of her work
in leading Hull House and handed them over to other
people because she had been so devoted to the House
and to other progressive causes that it came to exemplify
she left really enormous shoes to fill. And during her
life Jane had been head Resident and she was in
(16:18):
control over the board, and after her death these duties
fell to two different people. Adina miller Rich became head
Resident and Louise to Covid Bowen became head of the
Board of Trustees. These two disagreed frequently and very passionately,
until Adina finally resigned. The Head Residents who came after
her seemed less dedicated to Jane's ideas of social progress
(16:42):
and more about seeing to the needs of the immediate community,
and it gradually became less of an advocacy organization and
more of a practical The focus shifted a little closer
to home in all of its operations. Hull House gradually
became more like a typical nonp fit that you would
see today. It moved from an almost entirely volunteer staff
(17:05):
to one that was largely paid and supplemented with volunteers.
In nineteen sixty one, the Hull House buildings were to
be demolished for University of Illinois campus, resulting in protests.
Two years later, the trustees of Hull House made plans
to decentralize its services. The original Hull mansion and dining
(17:25):
hall actually became museums, but the rest of the buildings
were finally demolished to make way for the university. At
this point, Hull House became the Hull House Association, with
its programs and its resources spread out to different community
and neighborhood centers around Chicago. This decentralization was really also
a massive shift in how Hull House worked and how
(17:48):
it needed to manage its money, which was operationally hard
to manage, and it didn't do it entirely successfully. By
nineteen sixty nine, it had an operational deficit of two
million dollar dollars. The various sites actually wound up competing
with one another for support, and by nineteen eighty five
it was operating from twenty nine different sites around Chicago,
(18:11):
many of which were drawing from the same basic pool
of donation resources, so it was tight. It was kind
of a zero sum game. Yeah, they weren't helping themselves.
In ninete, in an attempt to close this gap and
make sure it would just be able to continue to operate,
Hull House scaled its focus way back, started working primarily
(18:34):
on foster care, and it dropped a lot of the
programs that were related to employment and culture and the
other services that had been part of its original mission.
And then in two thousand nine, it really started aggressively
cutting costs, including the employee pension plan UH. It also
loosened restrictions on its endowment so that the organization could
(18:55):
use some of that money towards other purposes. But on
January nine, the leadership of Hull House announced that it
was closing and declaring bankruptcy following a decline in government funding.
In spite of efforts to bring in more private donors,
it was by that point getting as much as eighty
five of its funds from the governments This is a
(19:17):
complete shift from when it was founded and was entirely
funded by Jane adams uh inheritance and the work of donors.
Hull House tried to raise enough money from donors to
stay open, but it just wasn't able to do it.
A week after the announcement, Hull House ceased operations and
(19:37):
laid off its entire staff of three hundred people, and
that put an end to a hundred and twenty three
years of operation. And of course, there was a lot
of speculation about what Jane would have thought about Hull
House closing, and opinions on that front are kind of divided,
but there's a general consensus that given her history of
advocating for labor rights, she would have been organizing the
(20:01):
pro the employees who lost their job, who really were
given almost no notice and didn't get any kind of
severance and protest. There's now a Jane Adams Hull House Museum,
which is built on the original Hull House site in
the whole home and the residents dining Hall. They have
a really impressive website that includes all kinds of stuff
(20:21):
about the museum and about her and about the Hull
House and all of that. Very cool. There are also
still settlement houses today, although many of them are non residential.
They sort of have the name, but but not the
function the same way and not the part where a
person was actually relocating to a community that was in need.
At least in the United States, community and neighborhood centers
(20:42):
have become a lot more common way of getting those
same sorts of resources into a community. So that is uh,
Jane Adams Hull House years, that element of her life.
In the next episode, we will talk about all of
that other stuff that Jane Adams did, because there was
really a lot of it. This is one of those
situations where we feel like we could have recorded eight
(21:05):
different episodes. Yeah, a really long series on Jane Adams.
If ever there were a historical figure that will make
you feel lazy, it's a Jane Adam, So you will
move to that next. Yes, I also have some listener
my own, please share. So this is from Bill, and
Bill says hello, Tracy and Holly. He talks about how
(21:26):
he's been listening for more than a year, and he
talks about several of our episodes. So he says, first
of all, I just listened to the ice Cream Podcast
While you did talk about the rise of ice cream
is a popular American food, you seem a little uncertain
as to why it has become such an American phenomenon
in the last century or two. I was initially puzzled
by this as I was listening to the podcast while
(21:48):
driving through rural northern Japan, and I passed several ice
cream shops and farms advertising homemade ice cream along the way.
I know, I'm just thinking about that makes me glad
that lunch is not too far away, he goes on
to say. But as I thought about it, an explanation
came to me milk prices. I live in Hokkaido, which
(22:10):
is basically Japan's dairy land. Even so, milk costs about
two yen a leader just about seven dollars and fifty
cents a gallon here. My sister, who lives in a
similarly rural town in Ohio, says that it is about
two and a half times what they pay for milk
at the grocery store. Other dairy products like butter and
(22:30):
cheese are similarly expensive here, even though they're made locally
and shipped to the rest of Japan. America has a
huge dairy industry, leading to lower prices on all dairy products,
ice cream included. In the case of countries like Japan
and China, they don't have as extensive of a dairy tradition,
while most countries with longer ice cream traditions don't have
(22:51):
the space for cattle farming necessary to bring prices so low.
So basically, Bill is theorizing of the reason the reason
ice cream is such an American pastime for eating because
we have so much milk. That makes so much sense.
I hadn't thought about it from the economic versus sort
of just general cultural right, but right makes complete sense. Well,
(23:14):
And we also got a note from another listener who
talked about how we didn't really go into the idea
of the soda fountain as sort of a place to
hang out in community. Um, which I think we might
have touched on tangentially. But yeah, that also played a
role in the world of ice cream. Uh So, Bill
goes on to say, my year old comment is related
(23:35):
to the ten Historical Hoaxes episode recorded by your predecessors.
One of those hoaxes was the newer Coli Stones, which,
regardless of their status as a hoax, are an interesting
historical tale in and of themselves. When they finished that
story on the podcast, they mentioned that the stones were
currently located in the Johnson Hummer House Museum in Ohio.
(23:56):
I was so disappointed that they left out the city
that the museum is in, my hometown, Coshakton. It's a
very small city, barely qualifying for the title based on
its population just there were the ten thousand mark, and
it's actually quite rural, considering that the nearest larger city
is a forty five minute drive away, and the nearest
city you've probably heard of is ninety minutes away. All
(24:17):
that considered, I would have been overjoyed to hear my
humble little hometown mentioned in a podcast I listened to you.
I had planned to write in but kept putting it off. Well,
now it happens, I know. Fast forward a year or
so to your podcast about Johnny apple Seed and your
reply to one of the listener males you read. You
mentioned a book on the history of Coshakton County with
an impressively long title as one of your major sources
(24:38):
for the podcast. Finally, my little corner of nowhere got
its brief moment in the sun. Thank you so much
for that, and it's really a strange feeling to hear
my hometown mentioned by anybody who wasn't born there. Kind
of goes on to talk about some podcast suggestions which
we will save in case we want to surprise people
with them later, and then says, thanks for making my
(24:59):
daily commute interesting and educational. So thank you so much. Bill. Yeah,
lots of interesting insights and thoughts. I love it. Yeah,
it kind of reminds me of uh, I like, I
like how people find such comfort in hearing their place. Yeah,
it's a little connection mentioned somewhere. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast,
(25:21):
you can at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history class
stuff and on Twitter at misston History. Are tumbler is
at mist in history dot tumbler dot com, and we've
been putting away on Pinterest. If you want to learn
a little more about some of what we've talked about today,
you can go to our website and search for the
(25:41):
word philanthropy and you will find how philanthropy works. You
can learn about that and so much more at our website,
which is how stuff Works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it How stuff
works dot com. Netflix streams TV shows and movies directly
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