Julia Lathrop and Outdoor Relief in Chicago, 1893-94

Abstract

IT WAS during the winter of panic in 1893-94 that I first saw fully revealed Julia Lathrop's profound compassion for her helpless fellow-men and her sense of responsibility for basic human needs, which afforded so much of the driving-power back of her splendid abilities. In our first impact with dire poverty, both with working people who suddenly found themselves without work and their savings exhausted as well as with the poor who, always on the edge of pauperism, at last found themselves pushed into the black abyss, we learned during that dreadful winter following the Chicago World's Fair, that when all else fails and private funds are exhausted, the county is under legal obligation to care for the poor. Julia Lathrop long before spring became a volunteer visitor in the county agent's office and was assigned for duty to the ten blocks surrounding Hull-House. Day by day she climbed rickety stairs and visited damp basements (for tenement-house regulations at that moment were practically non-existent), seeing those who applied to the county for relief. Her first experience with the situation in that district and through the county institutions is best told in her own words. following extracts are from her chapter on The Cook County Charities published in Hull-House Maps and Papers, in 1895. most spectacular proof of the poverty entailed upon Chicago by the general business depression of 1893, and locally by the inevitable human debris left by the World's Fair, could be daily seen during all the severer months of the winter of 1893 and 1894. It was a solid, pressing crowd of hundreds of shabby men and shawled or hooded women, coming from all parts of a great city whose area is over one hundred and eighty six square miles, standing'hour after hour with market baskets high above their heads, held in check by policemen, poly-