This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Jane Addam’s masterpiece, Twenty Years at Hull- House. The centennial is an appropriate time to remember Addams as she was: a powerful leader and thinker committed to creating a living democracy in the teeming cities of industrial America. From her base at Hull-House, she and her settlement house colleagues, created the public institutions and practices that made modern urban life possible. Although she did not use the term, Addams was engaged in commoning. The principles that informed her pursuit of the urban commons remain as vital today as they did at the turn of the 19th century.
Participation, reciprocity, and democratic cooperation were at the heart of Addam’s commons vision. She believed in the capacity of citizens to confront the problems of a society atomized by the industrial revolution. In the book Twenty Years, Addams paints a vivid picture of the settlement ideal in action. Founded in 1889 in Chicago’s largely immigrant 19th ward, Hull-House developed Chicago’s first public gymnasium, swimming pool and public baths; the first university extension and citizen preparation classes; the first little theater and community arts programs. Hull-House residents were at the center of the first public investigation of typhoid and tuberculosis; lead the fight for child labor laws and factory regulation, and established Chicago’s first effective garbage collection system.
In Twenty Years, Addams describes this myriad of programs and activities but does much more. Through rich portraits of immigrants and charity workers, workers and bosses, machine politicians and middle class reformers, Addams makes her case for genuine understanding across division of class and culture. She and the other largely upper-middle class residents of Hull- House sought a neighborly rather than charitable relation with the community. They understood that they had as much to learn as to offer their neighbors.
A critical element of Addam’s approach to social theory was her belief that democratic social relationships develop through practice. Hull- House itself was a catalyst for civic association: cooperatives, discussion circles, youth clubs, women’s and men’s clubs, cultural associations, and more. For Addams these civic associations were a dramatic expression of free people coming tougher as social equals. As a leading figure in the Progressive Movement, Addams understood that effective public institutions are necessary to guarantee the public good. She also understood that a living democracy requires active neighbors and citizens.
Addams shared with her contemporaries in the settlement movement, a broad search for workable alternatives to the laissez faire capitalism of the day. The Hull- House Social Science Club hosted debates on socialism, the labor movement, urban reform and much more. Open and eclectic in her own economic philosophy, Addams was a life-long proponent of cooperation. She shared Robert Owen’s belief in the power of cooperation over competition, and was deeply influenced by Fabian Socialist Beatrice Potter’s The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain.
Not content to simply theorize, she and her fellow Hull House residents organized a variety of local cooperative ventures: a women’s cooperative boarding house for sweatshop workers; a coal cooperative that provided low priced coal to 19th ward residents during Chicago’s cold winters; a book binding cooperative; and Hull House’s cooperatively run public kitchen. To Addams, cooperation was not only an alternative approach to organizing economic activity, but also a principle of social democracy. All the clubs at Hull House were self-governing.
In her 11 books and over 500 published articles, Addams left a rich body of work for those who would build on her legacy. Just as she believed that social knowledge comes through reflective practice, she used story to illustrate broader principles. She could enlist something as prosaic (and essential) as garbage collection to illustrate the dynamics of common action. Almost from the day of arrival on Halstead Street, Hull-House residents attempted to educate their immigrant neighbors on the importance of safe disposal of garbage, alas to little effect. It was one thing for the immigrants to allow house hold refuse to “innocently decay” in the open air and sunshine of the old country, but in crowded city quarters, garbage that is not properly collected and destroyed leads to sickness and death.
However, Addams did not simply blame the immigrants for the sanitation problem. She, or more accurately, members of the neighborhood-based Hull House Women’s Club, investigated and organized. Trudging through the 19th ward’s worst alleyways to inspect trash boxes in the sweltering summer of 1892, club members discovered over 1,000 violations of sanitation rules. Three politically appointed inspectors were fired as a result of the investigation and Addams herself, much to the chagrin of the reigning Irish alderman, won appointment as garbage inspector for the ward. Despite the shock of foreign-born neighbors at the sight of a woman garbage inspector, public attitudes and government response gradually changed and public health improved as a result.
To Addams the garbage collection saga provided a rich civics lesson. Initially skeptical and even hostile, neighbors’ attitudes changed as they witnessed fair enforcement of the regulations, shared landlord-tenant responsibility, and the politically appointed garbage haulers held accountable for working an eight hour day. These actions, Addams observed, were much more convincing than talks on civic responsibility. After all, she observed, “we credit what we see.”
Jane Addams forged her social philosophy at the dawn of modern public administration. In the 1890’s middle class reformers, often with close ties to business, were laying the foundation of the modern bureaucratic state with its focus on a merit-based, non- partisan civil service and professional management expertise. As a progressive reformer herself, Addams understood the need for effective public institutions, but she criticized the substitution of abstract standards of efficiency for a focus on the impact of public policies on real human beings. In Twenty Years, she tells the story of an unemployed worker who took a public works job during a particularly harsh Chicago winter. In order to get relief for his family, regulations required work on the project. The worker told Addams that his health was poor, but she insisted that he must follow the program rules. Soon after, he died of pneumonia. “I cannot see, [his two children]” she wrote, “ 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.”
What was the alternative to dependence on machine politicians or the new legions of disconnected public administrators? Addams proposed a positive version of democracy; one that moved citizens from the perimeters of public life to its center. She insisted on the ability of citizens, who after all, know their own situations best, to create effective community responses to public issues. She insisted that the challenge of modern government was to design machinery that supports the social capacity of its citizens. “If we could trust democratic government as distinct from whose which repress, rather than release, the power of the people*then we should begin to know what democracy really is, and our municipal administration would at last be free to attain Aristotle’s ideal of a city, ‘where men live a common life for a noble end.’”
Jane Addams devoted her life to developing a democratic practice adequate to a post-Lincoln industrial age. One hundred years after the publication of Twenty Years at Hull- House, her work remains instructive to those who struggle to claim public and common spaces in the city and beyond. An encounter with Jane Addams is both inspirational and instrumental. She invites us to join in the ongoing democratic project and offers enduring insights on just how to proceed.