The neighborhood in nation-building; the running comment of thirty years at the South End house

Front matter

Hl iin a

HHI Lae

UPR i i i biaa it i

Preface

THESE papers represent a series of landmarks in the gradual progress and expansion of the motive suggested by the title, as expressed in terms of one person’s experience.

Nearly all of them have appeared in print before, but none has ever had other than a special and limited circulation. They were prepared amid various circumstances, and were sent forth under many different auspices. Each is related necessarily to its own point in time. Yet it is believed that they present the development of a consciousness more truthfully than a unified, deliberate retrospect could do.

For the more objective and comprehensive treatment ot any phase of the work of the American settlements in general with relation to the subject, the reader may be referred to The Settlement Horizon, A National Estimate, by my associate, Mr. Albert J. Kennedy, and myself, published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

It is of the essence of the settlement that great profit comes to each from the residents’ life in common. I have had peculiar satisfaction in recounting mine as I have gone over the lessons of what has been a happy united endeavor from the beginning, with steadily increasing promise of future growth.

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Contents

UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENTS AS LABORATORIES IN SOCIAL SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENTS: THEIR POINT AND DRIFT

SETTLEMENT HOUSES AND City POoLitics

Appendix

CONTENTS

MAKING A NEIGHBORHOOD OUT OF A LopDG- ING-HOUSE SECTION

THE City AND 1Ts Loca, CoMMunITY LIFE THE STATE AS THE GREAT COMMUNITY THE REGIMENTATION OF THE FREE

THE WAR Camp COMMUNITY SERVICE SocraL WorRK AND NATION-BUILDING

THE FOREIGN MIss1ION COMPOUND AS A NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER

SETTLEMENT INTERNATIONALISM

THE SETTLEMENT RECONSIDERED IN RELA- TION TO OTHER NEIGHBORHOOD AGENCIES

PROGRESS AT THE SOUTH END HousE MEAas- URED BY DECADES

THE SETTLEMENTS’ FOOTHOLD OF OPPOR- TUNITY

QUESTIONNAIRE ON NEIGHBORHOOD REMI- NISCENCE

THe AvuTHorR’s CHRONOLOGY: ACTIVITIES, PUBLICATIONS

THE Various CENTERS OF THE SOUTH END HOUSE

THE SouTH END ALMANAC

The frontispiece portrait of the author is from a drawing in silver point by Paitip L. HALE

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THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN NATION-BUILDING

THE corporate unity of a people is artificial indeed; but art is long, and for that very reason a nation is easier unmade than made. — EDMUND BURKE, summarized by Sir Frederick Pollock.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN NATION-BUILDING

I THE UNIVERSITY SETTLEMENT IDEA!

In the movement toward a better social life, there is a resemblance to the great changes at the end of the Middle Ages out of which came the nations of modern Europe. All Europe had for the time forgotten itself in the excitement and adventure of the Crusades. A new and strange world, with its unusual customs and activities, had come into general knowledge, and began to give men a fresh look at their old surroundings from an altered point of view. A great moral impulse, which united all classes of society, and men from distant places, threw aside the petty rule of feudal lords and made the minds of the people open to the thought of being held together in the larger national bond.

At present we are returning from the modern kind of adventure — from exploration, enterprise, invention. Applying to the general life of men the new conception of complex and intimate relationships which the advance of science has brought, and the idea of unity which is the note of the philosophy of the time, we are working toward vast changes in the life of modern society, not perhaps so visible and outward as those involved in the beginnings of nations, but so profound as to be likely to make over the inner and closer life of modern people.

1 Address delivered at the Summer School of Ethics at Plymouth, 1892, where the first national gathering of settlement workers in this country took place. Published afterwards in the Andover Review; and, with addresses by other speakers at Plymouth, in the book Philanthropy and Social Progress (T. Y. Crowell and Co., New York, 1893).

The old bond of union was that of a political compact; the new bond of union is that of a social organism. It must have seemed difficult enough for those who had known only loyalty to a local lord to think of large numbers of duchies being held together by the single power of one great ruler; to think of an influence which should permeate into the different villages, and bring each into a common feeling with all the rest. The progress of republican government was held back at first, and is still greatly hindered, by the feeling that the people as rulers can wield only an intangible and ineffective force, as against the amorphous and unwieldy mass of the people as the subjects of government. But the idea of the nation, and of the-self-governed nation, is now a commonplace; it is the idea of the social organism that we, in our turn, are struggling to make real to ourselves.

Civilization is overreaching itself. Certain of its tendencies develop rankly, before corrective tendencies have begun to operate. The result is congestion in some places, and atrophy in others. We must find ways of uniting the parts of the social body, under the bonds of civilization, so that its vital influence shall not linger sluggishly at certain centers, but shall run strongly out into every distant extremity. It is no longer the negative ends of safety and freedom that are most to be sought for; it is as to the living out of life among the people that we are concerned. What has been left undone by spent forces will be accomplished through the rising momentum of new forces. We find ourselves compelled, to-day, in the interest of civilization itself, to see that the influences of civilization penetrate into all the ramifications of society. The great city — the typical product of civilization — shows by multiple effects the danger of having people cut off from the better life of society, and breeding with phenomenal rapidity all the evils with which society is cursed. And the difficulty is by no means confined to the most crowded quarters of cities. The poverty of the means of life is felt in other sections of cities besides those called the slums, among grades of people above those called the working people. Factory towns grow quickly, and mass together a large population with very little care that they shall live in a human way. And country villages, cut off by distance from elevating influences, as crowded city quarters are by their numbers, often reached by the bad effects of civilization far more quickly than by the good, offer a problem almost as serious as that of the cities themselves.

This situation, while it has always existed to a degree, is yet distinctly the product of the present time. Not until now could we fairly have appreciated it. Only now have we means adapted to meet it. Only modern civilization could have brought about the difficulty; only modern civilization could have understood it; only modern civilization can overcome it. The task is to make provision so that every part of society shall not only have a full supply for its fundamental human wants, but shall also be constantly refreshed from the higher sources of happier and nobler life. The great social evil is that the resources of society are so illy applied to the ‘supplying of its needs. There must be a shifting of resources to meet needs. The forces of civilization must be mobilized, and made ready for every sort of transference, until every tenement block, every country hamlet, may be able each in its kind to summon for its use all that can push out the present boundaries of life so as to make life what it is designed to be. From the point of view of the individual, and at close range, this is philanthropy; from the point of view of society, this is only far-sighted social statesmanship. The isolated philanthropy of one generation becomes the organized social work of the next, and perhaps the public charge of the third. The moral bullion of one age becomes the economic, and even the political, legal tender of the succeeding age. And these outward changes fully indicate that the new bond of union has been entered upon by society; and that in higher and higher ranges of life the forces of civilization are having a way made straight for them; so that more and more the best that life can mean shall become current in the whole experience of men, and shall add some distinctive touch to all their words and acts.

Now, apart from all general movements, political, economic, educational, and religious, toward a more comprehensive and more delicate organization of social life, there is a necessity for work to be done at many points where social evils are intrenched so that they cannot be met, even if they could be rightly estimated, by such agencies. The arm of the law, public and private charity, benevolent societies and institutions, churches, may fulfill ever so well their particular functions; but as yet, with a few notable exceptions, there are great tracts of life that are not entered, and are hardly known of, by these existing agencies. There must be some influence which shall enter in and take possession of these tracts of life in the name of what is true and pure. The lines along which this influence shall act are varied, intricate, and ill-defined. It must come close to the lives of the people themselves. It must be keen and sensitive to every sort of delicate, subtle feeling they have. It must, in short, be a personal influence. The person must act in a close, continued intimacy with those to whom he comes; that is, he must bea neighbor. He must join freely in the neighborhood life. He must have so varied an interest in human affairs that he shall be able to enter actively into sympathy on some side of life with every one of them. He must not establish a propaganda. He must not at first even have methods. He must not set about building up one more institution. He must not hurry. Above all, he must not be anxious about results. The _ children of this generation seek for a sign, but there shall be no sign given them; he must be content that the generations of the future shall see his work in its true light. This person, therefore, must have the historic sense and the philosophic breadth of view. He must love men, but deeper than all he must love humanity. All these things mean that this person must have drunk at the fountains of knowledge. One can hardly imagine an uneducated person coming as a true prophet to that vast region of life which is not mapped out, divided into departments, called by names, and embraced within a cultus. In the sociological pantheon this worship is at the altar of the Unknown God. The worshiper must come not only with the zeal for service, but with that eager, inquiring mind through which he shall be led into varied and constantly developing knowledge and power.

If we are bold enough to hold that civilization must do its work for the whole of society, and for every class and every section of society, we must, I think, see that it is essential that such effort as has been indicated should be undertaken, — not that it is interesting and commendable that it should be undertaken, but that if civilization is in any large degree to do its work for humanity, such effort is essential. It is for this reason one dares to believe that the university settlements, small in number and slight in results as yet, are destined to fill an important part among the many forces which are making for social progress. They come near to fulfilling the conditions that have been laid down. Their workers, like the people of the neighborhood, not only work there, but live there. As college men and women, they have learned to a degree how to live the good and beautiful life. As cultured persons, they believe in the saving quality of every sort of influence which tends to make men and women true to the human pattern. They also take a scientific as well as a philanthropic interest in learning accurately and comprehensively just what the state of life is in their neighborhood. They are able to compare this kind of life with others, and to see how each kind may be bettered by taking up elements from outside itself. By their broader knowledge and sympathies, they are able to originate plans for bringing unused resources of society to meet its unfilled needs, and are able to put into fuller operation agencies that are already in one way or another attempting to restore the balance.

A university, and a college in its measure, ought to be the special exponent of advancing civilization. It stands not only for a knowledge of the whole world as it is, but for the variety of human interests and hopes. The troubles of society ought to be most keenly felt there. That great masses of men and women are cut off from the better life of society, unknown and uncared for, is, rightly considered, a direct imputation of shame upon the university. It means that the cause of the university is in danger. It means, also, that the university is falling short of its full use. The university man or woman — that is, the truly cultured man or woman — is the one who ought to be able to go everywhere through the world, filled with childlike wonder, but never at the last capable of being surprised. But, alas! how we find ourselves, after our academical, and even after our professional courses, lost not merely in a vast body of new facts — that was to be expected — but lost in a maze of conflicting principles. There are more things in life than are dreamed of in our history, our political economy, or even in our philosophy. The weak idealism with which most graduates go into their life-work makes it inevitable that they should be racked and torn before they have rightly estimated the forces of evil, which must sometimes, in the narrower view of things, seem to be the only forces there are. Culture has progressed by gradually imaging in itself all that goes to make up the world’s life. But here are vast sections of mankind, whose life, for all that is distinctive of it, is practically an undiscovered country to those who most clearly stand for culture. How provincial our culture is. To how great a degree ignorant, to how great a degree selfish. How it generalizes about men — the proper study of mankind is man — and calls the result knowledge of them. How it satisfies itself with a distant echo of feeling for them. How often it develops effeminacy, instead of the strong, chastened refinement of the citizen of the world.

The university settlements, then, as the parent movement of university extension, stand for a double sense of urgency on the part of the universities — the necessity of giving what they have in abundance, and the necessity of gaining what they need in order to be true to themselves. There is a sort of sentimental cant which is indulged in by those who have but slightly touched the problem of the settlements, which represents the university men and women as youthful martyrs bringing all that is illuminating into places of absolute darkness. ‘‘Elevation by contact’’ is a phrase which these like to use. There is also a cant of those who have seen somewhat more of settlement work which represents the residents as combining together in a sort of club for the sake of a period of romantic existence which they in a measure justify by learning much out of the experience of their poorer neighbors. Let us clear our minds of cant. Let us, to begin with, simply remember that the university and the closely populated city quarter each need the other; and from that pass on to consider how the representatives of each can learn and do learn mutual helpfulness. But in judging the work of the settlements one does not, I think, get the right point of view who looks at them apart from the great social changes which they in their measure represent. Looked at in the true perspective, one sees that the simple fact of a group of educated men or women taking up their residence in a poor part of a city is something of significance and value. The phrase ‘‘elevation by contact,”’ ill-used as it has been, contains a truth in it. Let us not, in the endeavor to escape being patronizing, make the mistake of standing so erect as to lose our balance backward. The university settlement comes into the district from without. It is, if you please, imposed upon the district. The residents come first of all to help, conscious of bringing with them resources that will be positive contributions to the life of the district. They should have no fond hope of galvanizing a higher existence into the people, making it seem, by a sort of deus ex machina illusion, as if the people had accomplished the result of themselves. They should continue to bring in from without the district a variety of helpful influences. They should abhor patronage as they abhor the curse; but they will soon learn that their poorer neighbors detect and despise false humility just as readily. The true attitude for every social worker is that of a member of a noble family, in which there is the widest inequality, but equality and inequality are never thought of, and greater knowledge and strength mean only greater love and service.

It is, of course, perfectly true that, the critical test of the settlements will be whether they can justify themselves as establishments where men and women under organized direction shall become trained to do continuous, painstaking work of investigation and action, so that each settlement shall be accomplishing the improvement of its own neighborhood, and shall, from time to time, send out skilled workers to continue similar efforts in other surroundings. This test, under a right understanding of what a university settlement is in its motive and functions, every supporter of the settlements will heartily welcome. The only caution that need now be made is that in the initial stages of the movement any strictures made upon it, in comparison with the work of established institutions or organizations following a few easily defined lines and acting through specialists of long experience, must be considered as resulting from a false estimate of what settlement work is in idea, and of what, under its limitations, it must for some years yet be in fact. For the present, the work must be done by amateurs, for there are no professionals. It must not now and it may never be too closely organized, because it consists so largely of turning to social account delicate kinds of influence which cannot be borne through the channels of organization. And too much regularity and constancy must not yet be expected when those who enter this work have so largely to live upon locusts and wild honey, and to go clad in camel’s hair.

The prime requisite in the minds of educated men in undertaking any task is to know to a greater or less degree the situation in which they are to work and the material which they are to work upon. The close, scientific study of the social conditions in the neighborhood about a settlement is indispensable to its success. Of course, careful social analysis of a neighborhood demands the observation of months and years; but the task should be undertaken from the very beginning. The movement of the settlements will be false to its promise, it will cut off its own future, if it do not know for itself, and tell thinking people, and by its absolute statement of facts compel thinking people to hear, how the other half lives. Now this searching investigation proceeds only by long and loving acquaintance. Science and sympathy must unite if we are to have any living knowledge of the poor. This knowledge the university settlements offer good promise of giving — after seeing the lives of the people with that quickened vision which comes from a glowing heart, representing them again with the faithfulness of the truth-loving mind. Such work will, if it is seriously and systematically followed, give to the residents a keen sense of what the needs of the people are, in their just proportion and relation, and will develop in them a selective instinct for finding what may best be done to fill their needs, and it will even make the situation stand out before their minds until it shall induce in them the thought of newer and better forms of helpfulness.

After the study of the social statics of the neighborhood comes the study of its social dynamics. What the people are accomplishing for themselves both in their individual and home life, and in local organizations for whatever purpose, is a matter of absolute importance to a settlement before launching into its more constructive activity. Such effort on the part of the people will indicate more truly than anything else just where the greatest ground for hope is. The presumption is always against having a settlement introduce any newly devised scheme. It is always in favor of falling in with the current of what is already advancing in the neighborhood. In an enterprise of the people’s own, you find them under a kind of momentum which can never be so well artificially aroused. Every original aspiration for better things becomes to the resident of a true spirit something to © be known and understood, and then fostered with tender care. Every beginning of independent organization has to him the interest that a rare specimen has to a naturalist. And so gradually by the united efforts of the residents, the settlement, as a whole, comes to be in sympathetic touch with the homes of its neighbors, and with all combined movements among them toward trade organization, codperation, or thrift, or toward education and recreation. And a settlement is false to its purpose if it do not take knowledge also of the organized forces of sin that are at work in its vicinity. Sometimes these are not to a great degree developed out of the life of the neighborhood as such, but are foisted upon it by persons of other and more well-to-do neighborhoods. But even in such a case, the neighborhood in question by no means escapes the contagion of evil. The curse of the poor is their poverty; often the sacred hearthstone of honest poverty must be within sound of the revelry and debauchery of those to whom society is pleased to give its greater rewards. University settlements must be courageous enough and scientific enough to face the grim, inhuman evils that flaunt themselves in what are called the less respectable sections of cities, the horror of prostitution, the horror of drunkenness, and all their accompaniments and consequences. The time has come when the educated man and the educated woman must no longer merely shudder and turn away from the dark depths of life. The educated person cares little for the words and the ways of the sensationalist and the purveyor of artificial reforms. But he respects just as little that form of refined selfishness which says, ‘‘These things always have been and always will be; who touches them touches pitch.”

A settlement must be intimately acquainted with all other agencies which have come from without the neighborhood, with the intention of working for its improvement in some way or other. From the broadest possible view of the means of social progress the residents ought to learn to estimate how far these agencies do really upbuild the people. Young graduates entering into social work are in especial danger of being too narrowly critical of the efforts of sagacious people who have had a different sort of training for life than they. Their sense of proportion here often fails them. It is of great importance to the whole movement of the settlements that other kinds of social workers shall not be given cause to think of the residents as a group of exquisites, who find value only in certain highly refined methods, and condemn the rest because of flaws they may find. Often one’s judgment as to the value of certain kinds of work is greatly modified by fuller knowledge of the situation in which the workers find themselves. It is therefore the business of a settlement to give sympathetic study to forms of work which are conducted with a lack of taste and discernment, and even to those which are undertaken from what may seem to be false motives. They must have the sense which will enable them to see the value of the spirit of service under widely various forms. The a priori argument against any plan is almost worthless to the social investigator. What contribution does it make in its results to the living of life in this neighborhood, or in what way does it hinder the living of life in this neighborhood, are the questions for the men or women of a settlement.

And so it ought to be a matter of deep interest to each resident to become thoroughly conversant with the neighborhood existence. He must have his conversation, his citizenship, there. From before the establishment of the settlement through all its career, this process of acquaintance must continue. Who can say what vast results may come when a succession of educated men and women return to their more regular life in the home, in the business house, in the school and college, in the church, knowing from a living experience, through the daily use of all the senses, just what the life of the working classes, and the classes below them, actually is?

It is very important, for the first at least, that the settlements should be located with a view to the most favorable opportunity for studying what is distinctive of the great metropolitan poor quarters. The first settlements ought to be located where they can be within range of the variety of social problems which a city offers. There seems to be a current impression that a settlement ought to be placed in the very midst of the most degraded and hopeless classes, and, when settlements are not so situated, it is not an uncommon experience for some who have cherished mistaken sentiment with regard to settlement work almost to disparage the purpose of those at work, as if they were seeking the crown without the cross. But the object of a settlement is distinctly to face the whole problem of the less favored classes, and all the different phases of it. The settlement, therefore, is best located where it can easily look every way — toward the very poor, toward the regularly employed working people, and toward the criminal and vicious elements which are found in spots and streaks in all degrees of outward respectability. This is very important if the active work of the settlement for the improvement of the people is to have the value of a comprehensive experiment. A settlement located in the midst of a slum could deal with the people of the slum, but only as it made over the slum by new buildings, could it secure the interest of the better grades of working people. The self-respecting poor are often as jealous of their social standing as a duchess of her place in the order of precedence.

It is also an advantage for a settlement to be situated so as to be within easy reach of the centers where the life of the city converges. In many of our American cities there are already, or soon will be, great metropolitan poor districts. In the midst of these, rather than in distant and sequestered working-class quarters, the settlement ought to be placed. Often there are other parts of the city that seem to be more needy, but they present a narrower range of problems, and are often so far away as to be practically separate villages or towns by themselves. When the great forces of a city’s common life are steadily developing a distinctively metropolitan poor district, even though the process has not advanced very far, there, both for the sake of the investigation and of the active work of social reform, is where the university settlement ought to be — if possible just out of hearing of the din and roar of traffic, and just out of sight of the glare of the evening promenade.

Of course, after the most casual preliminary investigation, the question begins at once to rise, What shall we do? And though there is danger in settlement work of rushing too quickly into schemes for the improvement of the neighborhood, yet it is for the improvement of the neighborhood, above everything else, that the settlement has come. And the first thing to do is to strengthen the things which remain. Every kind of center of social life in the neighborhood should become the object of the wisest care that the settlement can give. First of all, the settlement should begin by being as nearly as possible a home. It is a disadvantage, I think, to have, from the first, easy public access to the house. The residents should be neighbors, and should become acquainted in the same natural way by which neighbors come to know one another in the simpler circles of society; that is, they must neither intrude, after the fashion of the census-taker, nor must they hold coldly aloof until all the forms of introduction have been gone through. The first and constant effort of the settlement should be to have its men or its women come into relations of friendliness and intimacy with the people in their homes. The bringing out of the possibilities of home life among the working people is one of the most valuable results that a group of educated men or women could aim at; and, of course, the women residents can accomplish far more in this direction than the men. It is a good plan to have one resident especially to visit in each of certain groups of houses, such as can conveniently be classified; and then, without hurry, or the use of mechanical means, let him become thoroughly acquainted with the people living there, with the purpose of bringing the resources of the settlement to bear upon that quarter just as fully as the circumstances, when they become known, will allow. As time goes on, the homes of the neighborhood will be better in their sanitary condition, in their food, in their reading, in their enjoyments, in their morals, and in their religious life, through direction and assistance from the settlement. This department of the work is capable of being systematically laid out and all its needs provided for; and this kind of organization might go on as rapidly as the residents could complete roughly the social analysis of the streets in which they undertake to visit.