Varieties of Cultural Experience in Jane Addams' Chicago

Abstract

WHEN Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established their home in the Hull mansion on Halsted Street in Chicago in 1889, they knew only that they wanted to connect up to the life of their time by living within the neighborhood of the immigrant poor. Their residence grew gradually into Hull-House, a pioneer social settlement, which served as a model to others seeking solutions to the social question at the turn of the century. What is often lost sight of is that Hull-House developed in Chicago as a response, in part, to its specific local currents. Restored to its setting, the Hull-House experience takes on a new and clearer meaning. One important facet of Jane Addams's encounter with Chicago was the movement for cultural uplift taking place in the city at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1889 Chicago was in the early stages of a process that would leave in its wake the major cultural institutions of the city: the Art Institute, the Newberry Library, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the University of Chicago, the Field Columbian Museum, and the John Crerar Library. The institutions were largely founded, sustained, and controlled by a group of wealthy Chicago businessmen who had gradually come to assume a responsibility for culture for the whole city. In the 1870's, Chicago's cultural life had reflected the heterogeneity of its population. The city abounded in societies organized along ethnic lines, in business ventures that marketed culture, and in the municipally administered school system and library. Even in this period, however, the societies of Protestants of British descent differed from their German or Jewish counterparts: the Chicago Historical Society and the Chicago Academy of Sciences were composed of a self-appointed elite (who were duly recognized by others) who saw themselves as the rightful keepers of the city's past and the appropriate explorers of the region's terrain. Prior to the Civil War, Chicago's elite had organized the Chicago Relief and Aid Society to grant support not to members of their own group but to