Although millions read In His Steps, its effect, and that of other Social Gospel literature, was merely inspirational. On the practical level, a number of earnest souls began to grapple with slum problems by organizing what were known as settlement houses. These were community centers located in poor districts that provided guidance and services to all who would use them. The settlement workers, most of them idealistic, well-to-do young people, lived in the houses and were active in neighborhood affairs.
The prototype of the settlement house was London’s Toynbee Hall, founded in the early 1880s; the first American example was the Neighborhood Guild, opened on the Lower East Side of New York in 1886 by Dr. Stanton Coit.
By the turn of the century 100 had been established, the most famous being Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago (1889),
Robert A. Woods’s South End House in Boston (1892), and Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in New York (1893).
While some men were active in the movement, the most important settlement house workers were women fresh from college—the first generation of young women to experience the trauma of having developed their capacities only to find that society offered them few opportunities to use them. The settlements provided an outlet for their hopes and energies, and they seized upon the work avidly.
The settlement workers tried to interpret American ways to the new immigrants and to create a community spirit in order to teach, in the words of one of them, “right living through social relations.” Unlike most charity workers, who acted out of a sense of upper-class responsibility toward the unfortunate, they expected to benefit morally and intellectually themselves by experiencing a way of life far different from their own and by obtaining “the first-hand knowledge the college classroom cannot give.” Lillian Wald, a nurse by training, explained the concept succinctly in The House on Henry Street (1915): “We were to live in the neighborhood. . . identify ourselves with it socially, and, in brief, contribute to it our citizenship.”
Lillian Wald and other settlement workers soon discovered that practical problems absorbed most of their energies. They agitated for tenement house Laws, the regulation of the labor of women and children, and better schools. They employed private resources to establish playgrounds in the slums, along with libraries, classes in everything from child nutrition and home management to literature and arts and crafts, social clubs, and day-care centers. When they observed that many poor families were so occupied with the struggle to survive that they were neglecting or even abandoning their children, they tried to place the children in foster homes in the country.
In Boston Robert A. Woods organized clubs to get the youngsters of the South End off the streets, helped establish a restaurant where a meal could be had for five cents, acted as an arbitrator in labor disputes, and lobbied for laws tightening up the franchises of public utility companies. In Chicago Jane Addams developed an outstanding cultural program that included classes in music and art and an excellent “little theater” group. Hull House soon boasted a gymnasium, a day nursery, and several social clubs. Addams also worked tirelessly and effectively for improved public services and for social legislation of all kinds. She even got herself appointed garbage inspector in her ward and hounded local landlords and the garbage contractor until something approaching decent service was established.
A few critics considered the settlement houses mere devices to socialize the unruly poor by teaching them the “punctilios of upper-class propriety,” but almost everyone appreciated their virtues. By the end of the century the Catholics, laggard in entering the arena of practical social reform, were joining the movement, partly because they were losing many communicants to socially minded Protestant churches. The first Catholic-run settlement house was founded in 1898 in an Italian district of New York. Two years later Brownson House in Los Angeles, catering chiefly to Mexican immigrants, threw open its doors.
With all their accomplishments, the settlement houses seemed to be fighting a losing battle. “Private beneficence,” Jane Addams wrote of Hull House, “is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city’s disinherited.” Much as a tropical forest grows faster than a handful of men armed with machetes can cut it down, so the slums, fed by an annual influx of hundreds of thousands, blighted new areas more rapidly than settlement house workers could clean up old ones. It became increasingly apparent that the wealth and authority of the state must be brought to bear in order to keep abreast of the problem.
World History
