At the turn
of the twentieth century, the Hull-House and Maxwell Street neighborhood
on the West Side of Chicago became a key site for witnessing the
urban experience. Chicago was among the premier cities in the world,
and the locality Jane Addams publicized and pictured was among the
nation's most visible. This "slum" – so named by
the U.S. Commissioner of Labor in 1893 – was quintessentially
urban with its streets easily reached by all. The densely populated
area of people speaking thirty languages included foreign nationals
from eighteen countries, racial minorities, and "Americans."
It embraced a thicket of tenements, street trades, sweatshops, and
factories; settlement houses and schools; and the highest levels
of morbidity in the emerging metropolis. Visited by foreign observers,
studied by a first generation of urban sociologists, written about
and photographed in the popular media, it served as a microcosm
to the urbanizing, industrializing, immigrant nation. "The
pell-mell of the nationalities is unbelievable," observed the
visiting German sociologist, Max Weber, who was reminded "of
a man whose skin is drawn back and whose insides you may see working.
For you can see everything."
Living together
on the cusp of modern life and problems, native groups and nationalities
previously insulated could not avoid addressing one another. Conflict,
inequality, and misunderstanding often marked their interaction.
Yet the result of discordant voices was fresh idiom – innovative
ways of seeing, speaking, and thinking. The "Russian-Hebrews"
lived in the Maxwell Street district, the Italians around Taylor
Street, the Bohemians in Pilsen, the Irish in Holy Family Parish,
the hoboes in Hobohemia, the African-Americans along Lake Street,
the middle-class American natives along Ashland Avenue, and the
Settlement House collegiate workers and intellectuals at Hull-House.
Industrial workers, craftspersons, entrepreneurs, clerks, street
vendors, storefront hawkers, market jobbers, newsboys and newsgirls,
entertainers, professionals, manufacturers, sweatshop operators,
hustlers, molls, slumming voyeurs, and tourists-all coursed along
the streets that became emblematic of urban activity immediately
beyond the Chicago Loop: Halsted, Maxwell, Jefferson, 12th (Roosevelt
Rd.), and Blue Island.
National history
was in the process of being made in a local crucible, close to the
flesh where people lived. The residents testified through a variety
of sources including letters, diaries, journals, newspaper articles,
magazines, memoirs, interviews, and the immediately popular medium
of photography. The Jews on Maxwell Street experimented with the
mass-market distribution of goods. Poles and Jews, for instance,
despised each other's ways and religion, but neither group hesitated
to do business on the streets. Ethnic businesses such as food services,
the nickelodeon, and popular music represented an "Americanizing"
of new immigrants and native-born Anglos. Benny Goodman picked up
the beat of jazz and began his musical career on the streets, in
the synagogue, and at Hull-House. The White Stockings in the West
Side Stadium were significant players in the professionalization
of baseball and the making of an "urban religion." Stealing
bases and souls at devil's speed, Billy Sunday, himself a White
Stocking, was born again in the Pacific Garden Mission to become
America's best-known evangelist.
The neighborhood
drew a steady stream of young writers, who quickly became immersed
in the polyglot urban space. Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson,
Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Clara Laughlin, Carl Sandburg, Leo
Rosten, Albert Halper, Meyer Levin, and Willard Motley, all achieved
national recognition after apprenticing on the streets. Dreiser
grew up on Chicago's West Side, and worked as a laundry wagon driver,
salesman, huckster, and bill collector before becoming a cub reporter.
He identified the emotional color of city life with this special
place where "people cursed or raved or snarled, but were never
heavy or old or asleep." More surprisingly, Sherwood Anderson
wrote Winesburg, Ohio, his twentieth-century classic about
small-town America, while living in Chicago. In a remarkable admission,
he commented: "These stories of the Winesburg book were
really written in a Chicago tenement, not in a village, and the
truth is that I got the substance of every character in the book
not from an Ohio village but from other people living around me
in the Chicago tenement. I simply transferred them to a small town
and gave them small town surroundings." Many of the writings
generated by journalists and novelists in this neighborhood, such
as Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), became milestones in urban
fiction.
Down these
streets, urban sociologists such as Nels Anderson (The Hobo,
1923), Frederic Thrasher (The Gang, 1927), Louis Wirth (The
Ghetto, 1928), Paul Cressey ("The Closed Dance Hall
in Chicago," 1929) published the first street-wise classics
in urban ethnography. Frank Lloyd Wright first presented his best-known
lecture, "The Art and Craft of the Machine" at Hull-House
in 1901. In concert with George Herbert Mead and William I. Thomas,
John Dewey tied his activity in the Hull-House neighborhood to his
formulation of an "American Pragmatism," first called
the "Chicago School" by William James at Harvard. When
John Dewey first arrived as Professor of Pedagogy at the University
of Chicago in 1894, he described the city as "hell turned loose"
and asked either that somebody please solve the problems "or
else dump them in the lake." He used Hull-House as the model
of what public schools could become in a "progressive"
education.
Social theory
was born on the streets and documented by the camera. A new technology,
street-level "social" photography, made visible as never
before the working classes and ordinary neighborhood life, as well
as the activities of middle-class reformers. Lewis Hine's career
as a pioneering documentary photographer was deeply influenced by
his educational experience and exposure to Chicago's West Side.
One could see the creases in a cheap suit, the smudges on tenement
wallpaper, the bargaining in the Maxwell Street Market, the crowded
playgrounds built by reformers – in short, how the "other
half" lived. Central to this visual knowledge was the realization
that the streets themselves in the industrial city became not simply
backdrop but active players in the drama of human lives. Picturing
particular people and places challenged earlier stereotypes of immigrants
and slums, and contributed to a striking shift in the perception
of the "public" in the twentieth century.
By taking
an in-depth look at the human environment of America's most famous
settlement house neighborhood, this research project will break
new ground in examining the relationships among place, history,
and memory.
-Burton
J. Bledstein
©Burton
J. Bledstein, November 2001
