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deH1ML from allhull.htm 1998 Apr 10 <[email protected]> For Project Gutenberg
[A Celebration of Women Writers]
TWENTY YEARS AT HULL-HOUSE WITH AUTOBIOGRAPIDCAL NOTES
G5ANEADD~ HULL-HOUSE, cmCAGO
AUTHOR OF "DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETIllCS," "NEWER IDEALS OF PEACE," "THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE CITY STREETS," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY NORAH HAMILTON
HULL-HOUSE, cmCAGO
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER
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knew little about the colony started by Mr. Maude at Purleigh contai . g several of toy's followers who were not permitted to live in Russia, and w id not see J\1r.
Mau again until he came to Chicago on his way from Manito ,whither he had transpo d the second group ofDukhobors, a religious sect ho had interested all of Tolstoy's owers because oftheir literal acceptance of on-resistance and other Christian doc ines which are so strenuously advocat by Tolstoy. It was for their benefit that Tol oy had finished and published" surrection," breaking through his long-kept resoluti against novel writing. Aft the Dukhobors were settled in Canada, of the five hundred liars left from the "R ection" funds, one half was given to Hull-House. It seemed ossible to spend is fund only for the relief of the most primitive wants of food a shelter 0 e part ofthe most needy families.
[Editor: Mary Mark Ockerbloo
This chapter has been put n-line as rt of the BUILD-A-BOOK Initiative at the Celebration of Women riters. Initial t t entry and proof-reading of this chapter were the work of volunteer erri Perkins.
[Editor: Mary M Ockerbloom]
[A Celebratio of Women Writers]
"Chapter II: Public Activities and Investigations." by b Jane Addams 1860-1935) From: Twenty Years at Hull-House h Autobi graphical Notes. by Jane Addams. New York: The MacMillan Com any, 1912 (c.1910) pp. 281-309.
[E; itor: Mary MarkOckerbloom]
g~irJ-7 CHAPTERXm PUBLIC ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS
One of the striking features of our neighborhood twenty years ago, and one to which we never became reconciled, was the presence of huge wooden garbage boxes fastened to the street pavement in which the undisturbed refuse accumulated day by day. The system of garbage collecting was inadequate throughout the city but it became the greatest menace in a ward such as ours, where the normal amount of waste was much increased by the decayed fruit and vegetables discarded by the Italian and Greek fruit peddlers, and by the residuum left over from the piles of filthy rags which were fished out of the city dumps and brought to the homes of the rag pickers for further sorting and washing.
The children of our neighborhood twenty years ago played their games in and around these huge garbage boxes. They were the first objects that the toddling child learned to
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climb; their bulk afforded a barricade and their contents provided missiles in all the battles of the older boys; and fmally they became the seats upon which absorbed lovers held enchanted converse. We are obliged to remember that all children eat everything which they fmd and that odors have a curious and intimate power of entwining themselves into our tenderest memories, before even the residents of Hull-House can understand their own early enthusiasm for the removal of these boxes and the establishment of a better system of refuse collection.
It is easy for even the most conscientious citizen of Chicago to forget the foul smells of the stockyards and the garbage dumps, when he is living so far from them that he is only occasionally made conscious of their existence but the residents of a Settlement are perforce constantly surrounded by them. During our first three years on Halsted Street, we had established a small incinerator at Hull-House and we had many times reported the untoward conditions of the ward to the city hall. We had also arranged many talks for the immigrants, pointing out that although a woman may sweep her own doorway in her native village and allow the reuse to innocently decay in the open air and sunshine, in a crowded city quarter, if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed, a tenement-house mother may see her children sicken and die, and that the immigrants must therefore not only keep their own houses clean, but must also help the authorities to keep the city clean.
Possibly our efforts slightly modified the worst conditions, but they still remained intolerable, and the fourth summer the situation became for me absolutely desperate when I realized in a moment of panic that my delicate little nephew for whom I was guardian, could not be with me at Hull-House at all unless the sickening odors were reduced. I may well be ashamed that other delicate children who were tom from their families, not into boarding school but into eternity, had not long before driven me to effective action. Under the direction of the first man who came as a resident to Hull-House we began a systematic investigation of the city system of garbage collection, both as to its efficiency in other wards and its possible connection with the death rate in the various wards of the city.
The Hull-House Woman's Club had been organized the year before by the resident kindergartner who had first inaugurated a mother's meeting. The new members came together, however, in quite a new way that summer when we discussed with them the high death rate so persistent in our ward. After several club meetings devoted to the subject, despite the fact that the death rate rose highest in the congested foreign colonies and not in the streets in which most of the Irish American club women lived, twelve of their number undertook in connection with the residents, to carefully investigate the conditions of the alleys. During August and September the substantiated reports of violations of the law sent in from Hull-House to the health department were one thousand and thirty-seven. For the club woman who had finished a long day's work of washing or ironing followed by the cooking of a hot supper, it would have been much easier to sit on her doorstep during a summer evening than to go up and down ill-kept alleys and get into trouble with her neighbors over the condition of their garbage boxes. It required both civic enterprise and moral conviction to be willing to do this three evenings a week during the hottest and most uncomfortable months of the year. Nevertheless, a certain number of women persisted, as did the residents, and three city inspectors in succession were transferred from the ward because of unsatisfactory services. Still the death rate remained high and the condition seemed little improved throughout the next winter. In sheer desperation, the following spring when the city
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contracts were awarded for the removal of garbage, with the backing of two well-known business men, I put in a bid for the garbage removal of the nineteenth ward. My paper was thrown out on a technicality but the incident induced the mayor to appoint me the garbage inspector of the ward.
The salary was a thousand dollars a year, and the loss of that political "plum" made a great stir among the politicians. The position was no sinecure whether regarded from the point of view of getting up at six in the morning to see that the men were early at work; or of following the loaded wagons, uneasily dropping their contents at intervals, to their dreary destination at the dump; or of insisting that the contractor must increase the number of his wagons from nine to thirteen and from thirteen to seventeen, although he assured me that he lost money on every one and that the former inspector had let him off with seven; or of taking careless landlords into court because they would not provide the proper garbage receptacles; or of arresting the tenant who tried to make the garbage wagons carry away the contents of his stable.
With the two or three residents who nobly stood by, we set up six of those doleful incinerators which are supposed to burn garbage with the fuel collected in the alley itself. The one factory in town which could utilize old tin cans was a window weight factory, and we deluged that with ten times as many tin cans as it could use-much less would pay for. We made desperate attempts to have the dead animals removed by the contractor who was paid most liberally by the city for that purpose but who, we slowly discovered, always made the police ambulances do the work, delivering the carcasses upon freight cars for shipment to a soap factory in Indiana where they were sold for a good price although the contractor himself was the largest stockholder in the concern. Perhaps our greatest achievement was the discovery of a pavement eighteen inches under the surface in a narrow street, although after it was found we triumphantly discovered a record of its existence in the city archives. The Italians living on the street were much interested but displayed little astonishment, perhaps because they were accustomed to see buried cities exhumed. This pavement became the casus belli between myself and the street commissioner when I insisted that its restoration belonged to him, after I had removed the first eight inches of garbage. The matter was finally settled by the mayor himself, who permitted me to drive him to the entrance of the street in what the children called my "garbage phaeton" and who took my side ofthe controversy.
A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, who had done some excellent volunteer inspection in both Chicago and Pittsburg, became my deputy and performed the work in a most thoroughgoing manner for three years. During the last two she was under the regime of civil service for in 1895, to the great joy of many citizens, the Illinois legislature made that possible.
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Many. of the foreign-born women of the ward were much shocked by this abrupt departure into the ways of men, and it took a great deal of explanation to convey the idea even remotely that if it were a womanly task to go about in tenement houses in order to' nurse the sick, it might be quite as womanly to go through the same district in order to prevent the breeding of so-called "filth diseases." While some of the women enthusiastically approved the slowly changing conditions and saw that their housewifely dutie~ logically extende~ to the adjace~t alleys ~d ~treets, they yet were quite certain. @ that "It was not a lady's Job." A revelation of this attitude was made one day ill a I '2 conversation which the inspector heard vigorously carried on in a laundry. Ottl! sf tie J
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