The Social Settlement and Civic Responsibility-The Life Work of Mary McDowell and Graham Taylor

Abstract

Chicago in 1894 had a population of 1,300,000, double the population of ten years previously, when it was 630,000. This sudden growth, the mass immigration of the period, the industrial turmoil, the exploitation of low wages, the notorious political corruption, had created a reputation for the city that greatly disturbed many of its citizens. The World's Columbian Exposition of 1892-93 was planned in part to strengthen the more constructive elements of city life and to cultivate some respect among the people of this country and bring visitors from abroad. But some of the workmen who flocked to the city for employment stayed on^ and the year 1894 found a depression settling in with serious unemployment and without any of the ameliorating possibilities of public or private social welfare programs as we know them today. Five years earlier, Jane Addams had returned from a trip abroad, during which she had visited with Tolstoy and had studied the work at Toynbee Hall then just getting under way in Whitechapel, London, under the leadership of Samuel A. Barnett, with the volunteer help of students from Oxford and Cambridge. Miss Addams had been greatly impressed by the need for knowing more about the life of the common man and his family and the conditions under which he was living. She sensed the possibilities of developing the life of the people through the sharing of experience, the building of resources, and the creation of opportunities taken for granted in more favored parts of the city. With her friend Ellen Starr, she had taken up residence at Polk and Halsted Streets, and by 1894 Hull House had become well known in the city and throughout the country. Hull House started with no planned program but with the desire to learn from the life of its neighbors and neighborhood, to collect facts as a basis for public improvement, to devise means of gaining insight into needs underlying the facts, and to work with and not for neighbors and others to promote justice and human welfare. Thus was forged the philosophy that has undergirded the settlement movement through all these subsequent years. The settlement movement from the start developed along the lines of work with all the age groups represented in the family, a broad conception of cultivating educational and cultural resources in a neighborhood in which in the early days immigrants from many lands predominated, flexibility of program to meet changing needs, and practical development of democratic procedures in group life and in the community. Time does not permit any description of the way in which this movement developed in widely different neighborhood settings, in periods of inflation, depression, shifting populations, national and racial conflicts, and war tensions. Nor does it permit analysis of the program changes, as school services broadened, as